What’s new within SharePoint 2013 Search? – PART I

PART I: Office 365 / SharePoint Online

(Concern that this is BETA stuff. Features and functions can be changed or shift until the final release!)

We now have access to the admin stuff of our Search Service Application. That’s a milestone forward! As we can see nearly all that stuff we missed in SharePoint Online v2010 is now available. We can configure our crawled and managed properties. Configure Result Sources which was Federated Result / Scopes in SharePoint Search 2010:

Here you see a confrontation between an Office 365 / SharePoint Online Search Admin site and an on-premise version:

So you see that we have still no access (maybe it’s coming up) to the “crawling” area. SO of cause that may be self-evident from Microsoft side. For me as a customer it would be nice if I can crawl my Extranet or data which will be bound in via BCS.

Integrating external Data in Office 365 / SharePoint Online Search can of cause be managed with the options coming with “Manage Result Sources”. As you can see we can connect “Remote SharePoint” which means an Index of an on-premise SharePoint 2013 installation or data coming from an Open Search source.

So with all this functions like “Manage Schemas”, “Search Dictionaries”, “Query Rules” and “Result Sources” we are able to build much more powerful Search Solution even Search Driven Applications also with Office 365 / SharePoint Online 2013.

Stay tuned for the next parts in this series:

Part II: What happens with FAST in SharePoint 2013
Part III: A look in the deep what’s behind the new Search functions like “Search Dictionaries”, “Query Builder”, “Query Client Type”
Part IV: Admin Stuff
Part V: Frontend Stuff