Session recap DIWUG Finding or Searching

Session recap DIWUG Finding or Searching header image

Presenting at the DIWUG is always major fun. Yesterday I had the opportunity to present a duo session with my father (Albert Schot). We did Dutch session on searching versus finding with Enterprise Search in Office 365. In a 45 minute demo packed session we tried to show off some of the cool stuff you can achieve with search.

As promised a write up would follow including the slides of the presentation, as well as all the demo queries that where presented.

Query Rules

The first few demo’s where focused around search, and helping your users in their search process. We took a set of sample query rules to explain the power and ease of use for your end users. The most common scenario that you would see is adding context to your users search query. For instance you know that when a users is searching for ‘presentation contoso’ he or she is probably looking for a specific slide deck rather than documents that contains the word presentation. By leveraging Query Rules you can tweak a users query and add more meaning to them. So in our case we created a presentation query rule.

This presentation query rule leveraged the action that allows you Change ranked results by changing the query. First we added a set of query conditions with action terms for presentation, presentations and slidedekcs. Besides that we changed the query. We used the subjectTerms as that contains all the unmatched terms, and extended the query with the FileExtension property for both ppt and pptx

{subjectTerms} and (FileExtension:pptx OR FileExtension:ppt)

Obviously you can extend the query with other filetypes as well, for instance .html files for your sway presentations. You can find the basics on how to create a query rule on support.office.com, it contains a detailed write up to create your own query rules.

As the educational partners do not use the presentation example that much, so we changed the scenario a bit. You can tweak the query as far as you like, so we introduced a teaching materials content type. This content type is used for all the teach materials available on the portal. By using the ContentTypeId property you can create a query that fires for teaching materials and only show the unmatched query.

ContentTypeId:0x010100ED713ECA1BD84940B67209AE6CC1B61C* AND {subjectTerms}

By doing so you enable your users to search for teaching materials and only show results that are from that specific content type.

By using these Query Rules you can create context for your users and help them find relevant results.

Search Results

Instead of helping your customers searching for content you can also use the search result web parts and provide a set of results. Predefined queries can help if you are working with the more complex results that you might want to show. A great example of that is an overview of all communities in your portal. In that case you can just use community homepage for, resulting in the following query:

"Community Home.aspx"

By adding a search results webpart and configuring the query to contain that community homepage you will be presented with an overview of all communities that are available in Office 365. You can also personalize that query by using a query. The way that works is described in Using SharePoint Search for my communities overview.  But it is working by using a specific content type id, and a query variable called user.

ContentTypeId:0x010027FC2137D8DE4B00A40E14346D070D5201* AND {User}

Query variables are a great way to provide dynamic and personalized queries. You can find an overview of all available Query Variables in SharePoint Server 2013 on TechNet. Another great example of of using the query variables is a personalized news query. Imagine a large corporate intranet where you have both corporate news, and news for departments (or schools). In this scenario you could use the enterprise search to create a query that returns the corporate news (from a single location), and use a personalized part that returns the department news for the department for a user. By using the and / or statements in a query you could create the following query:

(ContentTypeId:0x010100C568DB52D9D0A14D9B2FDCC96666E9F2\* And Path:https://schot001.sharepoint.com/sites/contoso) OR (SiteName:{User.Department} AND ContentTypeId:0x010100C568DB52D9D0A14D9B2FDCC96666E9F2\*)

This query returns everything from a specific content type and the path /sites/contoso, as well as everything from that content type where the site name matches the site name the user has configured in their profile. Each user would see a personalized view of news based on their department. You could of course use other profile properties as well, or extend the query to use more than one property.

Searching Next-Gen Portals

With Office 365 you also have the opportunity to use the next-gen portals. The current available next-gen portals are Groups and the Video Portal. A great way to either collaborate or share video within your organization. But what if you want to use content from these sources and display them in dynamic overviews on existing team sites? You can use some pretty simple queries to query both sources.

Querying groups can be done using either the site template or the web template. The site template is called ‘group’, as well as the web template. The site template id that corresponds with that is 64. We used a sample query of all documents that where changed in groups where the current user is the author. This helps your users to keep track of everything they changed their groups.

(SiteTemplateId:64 OR SiteTemplate:Group OR WebTemplate:Group) AND IsDocument=1 AND Author:{User}

Another option you have is to search all the video’s in a specific channel. Video’s in Office 365 can have two different content types, 0x0120D520A808 is for video’s that you upload to your asset library. The content type for video’s you upload in the new video portal is 0x010100F3754F12A9B6490D9622A01FE9D8F012. Each channel that gets created will have its own site collection that is mapped to the /portals managed path. So for the community channel the path will be https://schot001.sharepoint.com/portals/community. In our demo we showed a query that would render all video’s from a specific channel and all other video’s that where available.

(ContenTypeId:0x0120D520A808\*) OR (ContentTypeId:0x010100F3754F12A9B6490D9622A01FE9D8F012\* AND Path:https://schot001.sharepoint.com/portals/community)

It was great to see how many people where already using the Office 365 stuff that is available. As the presentation was presented at the DIWUG the slides are Dutch, and you can find them on SlideShare.

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