In larger organizations it’s hard to make an easy transition to a newer version of a major product. Many organization have SharePoint 2007 running for some departments while omajority of a company still operates in SPS 2003 mode; or the other way around. Having tough time finding the information only frustrates users and decreases the popularity of search. In this article we'll see how you can take advantage of search capabilities from MOSS platform and use it to search content from SPS. Also, we'll see how MOSS 2007 will search SPS and provide facets and various other filtering options.
First we start with configuring our SSP content source to include SPS. We open Content Sources under search administration or simply by using this URL: http://[my ssp site]/ssp/admin/_layouts/listcontentsources.aspx
We’ll select local content source and edit its Start sites
NOTE: I have my SPS 2003 in the list along with all the other MOSS sites as shown below for http://mysharepointsite2003
Ensure your default content access account found here http://[my ssp site]/ssp/admin/_layouts/contentaccessaccount.aspx has read permission on your charepoint site, otherwise you will get Access Denied errors in your Search Logs.
After you’ve added your SPS 2003 to the list and performed a full crawl your search will start picking up results from SPS 2003. Now we'll use faceted search webpart to group your results by facets and in our case we’ll group files by file extension (Word Documents, Text files etc).
Faceted Search webpart is an open source set of webparts available from codeplex.com. It’s a great tool allowing you to generate facets based on search results that are comming from various datasources. In here I will show how it will be configured to display various file types to site visitors.
Since SPS 2003 doesn’t have a notion of Content Types – we’ll use file extension which is available in both SPS and MOSS. In your metadata properties definition found here http://[my ssp site]/ssp/admin/_layouts/schema.aspx you will see FileExtension in the list. Choose to edit this property, and add new mapping called DocIcon
DocIcon is used in SPS to display the document icon for files in libraries and fortunately for us it carries text value of the file extension. Now your FileExtension picks up extensions from both SPS and MOSS.
Last part is to configure Faceted Search Webpart column settings XML, found in the webpart properties as shown below
Your properties will look like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>
<root xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xsi=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/SharePoint/FacetedSearch/”>
<Columns>
<Column Name=”FileExtension” OrderBy=”Hits” SortOrder=”Descending” TotalResults=”5″ DisplayName=”File Type” DefaultImage=”STS_ListItem16.gif” >
<Mappings>
<Mapping Match=”eml” DisplayName=”Email” Image=”iceml.gif” />
<Mapping Match=”msg” DisplayName=”Email” Image=”icmsg.gif” />
<Mapping Match=”html” DisplayName=”Web Page” Image=”html16.gif” />
……….
<Mappings>
<Column>
<Columns>
<root>
That’s all, now your search result page will pick up files from both SPS and MOSS and will facet the results by type like this:
This is just an example with file extensions as facets, you can add new columns to your SPS 2003 or MOSS site and make them available as custom managed properties that ultimately can be consume by facets. Those can be column carying business data, helping your site visitor pick search results based on that data.
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy, Microsoft SharePoint MVP
Blog: www.sharemuch.com
