Part
I is about Search Driven in on-premise environments
Part II
will show the options and differences with O365 SharePoint Online
In Part
I I wrote about the options and scenarios with Search and Search Driven Apps in
SharePoint 2013 on-premise. Now let’s see which option we have using the online
version of new SharePoint 2013.
There
are two big differences in SharePoint Online:
1.
We
did not have the new Webpart Family “Search Driven Content”.
So in fact we only can use the common Search
Result Webpart and its options within the Query Builder to create dynamic
search solutions
2.
In
SharePoint Online we are not able to configure own content sources ore manipulate
the settings like Crawler scheduling etc.
Missing "content source"
option in SharePoint Online and its impact
Because
of the option “content sources” is not available in SharePoint Online we have
to look for alternatives to bring in own content in our SharePoint Online environment.
Another point is the index freshness which cannot be manipulated setting up Crawler
scheduling ore manually decide to configure continuous crawling
option.
Index freshness
Also in
the official technet documentation is not a clear statement continuous crawling
is set up by default for SharePoint Online or not. My own experience say: “Yes,
it is”. I get search result in the index within 2min – 4min. This is really
fast and for me in the most scenarios ok.
Own content
To bring in own content in you SharePoint Online
Search you have to use “Result Sources” To set up those 3th Party Result
Sources you can use “Site Setting” to configure them in the context of a Site
Collection ore SharePoint Admin Center to do it global.
The dialog
for setting up a Result Source shows the option for bring in own content:
·
Local SharePoint
·
Remote
SharePoint
·
OpenSearch
1.0/1.1
·
Exchange
For all
options you have to configure a security context to access the result source.
Using Remote SharePoint you can use SSO or path thru authentication. Using Open
Search we have the option to use Anonymous, Basic Authentication, Digest
Authentication, NTLM, Form Authentication or Cookie Authentication. Using
Remote SharePoint to call an on-premise SharePoint Search you have to set up a
Search Federation based on an Identity Federation.
In all
cases we had to configure a Remote Address and we can configure a Query Transformation
(as described in Part
I) to filter ore manipulate the query which is send to the remote system.
In my
demo tenant I simply use some open search based systems.
Source
|
Source Url
|
Twitter
|
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q={searchTerms}
|
Facebook
|
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}+site%3afacebook.com&format=rss
|
YouTube
|
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q={searchterms}
|
(These can of cause also be remote endpoints for
your LOB systems or other on-premise sources)
Setting up those systems as a “Result Source” get me the option to use them in my SharePoint Online system to build Search Driven experiences.
Search Driven experiences
and solutions in SharePoint Online
Easiest way to use the new result source and
within them remote content is using them in the result Webpart. In this example
you can see an overview site in my SharePoint Online that aggregate News from
configured social media sources based on Result Webparts:
For example
filling the atwork area for Twitter news I configured
the Result Webpart with those setting:
·
Setting
up the “Select a query” with the “Twitter” Result Source
·
Fill
in a query that focus to the desired results
And of
course you can mix results coming from remote sources and results coming from your
SharePoint Online source.
This
Webcast shows the described samples in action: