Thoughts on SharePoint 2010 Search Refinement

By -
I've been spending a lot of time lately working with SharePoint 2010's "Refinement Panel" web part.

This capability was available only as a third-party add-in or Codeplex solution back in the MOSS days, but I was very excited to learn that it had been incorporated natively in 2010.

It's frustrating, however, to have to constantly explain to customers that Refinement goes only 500 results deep unless you have FAST, which requires Enterprise CALs. The standard search provides a Refinement Panel that defaults to an Accuracy Index of 50 and goes to a maximum of 500. This means that the Refinement capability will only work for the first 50-500 results returned.



So if a company is stuck with Standard CALs and no FAST, how do they get around this limitation? Surely a mid to large size company will have many more than 500 list items, documents and other artifacts returned in a global search of all content sources, including SharePoint sites, File Shares, etc.

So in our hypothetical mid to large size company scenario where a search for "widget" returns 5,000 results, how do we mitigate the problem I've outlined with the Refinement Panel? Well, there are a couple of ways:

  • Create focused search scopes
  • Remove the Refinement Panel web part for global searches

Fortunately, data from systems connected via Business Connectivity Services can't be used until you reach the Enterprise CAL level, either, so definitely use FAST for that and many other search improvements.

To conclude, don't fret if you're stuck with just the Standard CAL search experience. There are a few things you can do to make it a little better, especially with the Refinement Panel:

  • if you do use the Refinement Panel, limit results by creating scopes
  • Change the default Accuracy Index from 50 to 500 (the maximum in Standard)
  • Enable Counts for your Refinement Panel
  • ...but be sure to uncheck the "Use Default Configuration" box in the toolpart. :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ERROR: Failed to create feature receiver...

By -
I was working on a STSDev project which deployed a feature with a feature receiver. I had the feature working without the FeatureReceiver but as soon as I added the FeatureReceiver related attributes to my <Feature> element I got the following error: Failed to create feature receiver object from assembly "Org.Project.Solution, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c632353d405b3209", type "Org.Project.Solution.MyFeature.FeatureReceiver" for feature 6a9b2358-ea4e-486d-a4e4-4f813c52ce88: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: type at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic) at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFeatureDefinition.get_ReceiverObject() After much digging around I discovered that STSDEV's Solution config file refers to a namespace as well as the dll. My FeatureReceiver's namespace was not prefixed with the right namespace So just
Read more

Programmatically Update Page Layouts

By -
I updated my page layouts that I deployed as a feature, but found that I could not overwrite the Layout File. The solution was to add a new page layout and then you would have to associate the new layout with every page on your site that used it. Obviously with a site of any size you'd have a lot of manual work to get this done, so doing it programmatically makes for a much better (and thorough) approach. After you've got your new page layouts, you could do something like this (in your event receiver class): public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { //replace current page layouts with new page layouts on all pages SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web; SwapPageLayout(web, "FullWidthContentWithTitleV1.aspx", "FullWidthContentWithTitleV2.aspx"); } private void SwapPageLayout(SPWeb web, string oldPageLayoutName, string newPageLayoutName) { PublishingWeb pubWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPu
Read more