Brian Wilson : Search

Office SharePoint Server 2007 : Search : Configuring NTFS permissions for NTFS file share/ folders (that don't inherit permissions) for the search default content access account (xCacls)

Brian Wilson — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:26:00 GMT

Here is a step by step guide (I had to write it up anyway J ) to configuring permissions for the search default content access account for NTFS folders that have many folders and files that don’t inherit permissions on your network.

1. Download XcAcls.exe (cAcls is depreciated and does not support batch files)

This command-line tool allows you to set all file system security options that are accessible in Windows Explorer. XcAcls does this by displaying and modifying the access control lists (ACLs) of files. XcAcls is especially useful in unattended installations of Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional or Server. By using this tool, you can set the initial access rights for folders in which the operating system resides.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7a3e2241-d7d0-42b6-b86e-6eda88726c01&displaylang=en

2. Install tool using setup program

3. Configure environment variable so that you can call xcAcls from any folder in command prompt

· Navigate to the install location: e.g. “C:\Program Files\Resource Kit” and copy this path into your clipboard.

· Open up your machine’s environmental variables (Right Click my Computer, Properties )

· Open the Path variable and append the install location to the path. Be sure to add a trailing semi colon.

· Hit Ok 3 times.

4. Add the default search access account using the xCacls utility.

a. Fire up a command prompt. Ensure that it is running under user privileges that have access rights to the folder structure you want to change.

· To fire up a command prompt in a specific user context : “runas /user Domain\username”. E.g. “runas /user CORPDOMAIN\networkfileshareadminaccount”

b. Execute the following command : xcacls C:\FOLDERSTRUCTURE\BASEFOLDER /T /E /C /G YOURDOMAIN\SEARCHCONTENTACCESSACOUNT:R /Y

For the exact meaning of each parameter:

· /T recursively walks through the current folder and all of its subfolders, applying the chosen access rights to the matching files or folders.

· /E edits the ACL instead of replacing it. For example, only the administrator will have access to the Test.dat file if you run the XCACLS test.dat /G Administrator:F command. All ACEs applied earlier are lost.

· /C causes Xcacls.exe to continue if an "access denied" error message occurs. If /C is not specified, Xcacls.exe stops on this error.

· /G user:perm;spec grants a user access to the matching file or folder.

o R Read

o C Change (write)

o F Full Control

o P Change Permissions (special access)

o Take Ownership (special access)

o X EXecute (special access)

o E REad (Special access)

o W Write (Special access)

o D Delete (Special access)

· /Y disables confirmation when replacing user access rights. By default, CACLS asks for confirmation. Because of this feature, when CACLS is used in a batch routine, the routine stops responding until the right answer is entered. The /Y option was introduced to avoid this confirmation, so that Xcacls.exe can be used in batch mode.

Result : All folder and files below and including the parent folder (e.g. basefolder) will be have the specified account added to their security settings. This includes files and folders that are set to not inherit permissions from their parent.

Please don’t forget to test first on isolated folder structure first.

Search: Fine Tuning search relevancy in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007: Getting the search results your user expects

Brian Wilson — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 23:06:00 GMT

Relevance is about how closely the search results match what the user wanted to find.

To improve the search results that MOSS Search returns, we need to understand how search results are ranked:

SharePoint performs two types of ranking, dynamic ranking and static ranking. Dynamic ranking, is something that happens on the Query Servers and depends on query and term matching whereas static ranking occurs at index time. Static ranking is query independent and is computed at index time. Lets dive deeper into each of these:

Dynamic Ranking:

This looks at the content or property values for a content item such as:

Anchor Text

This evaluates the text that describes a target. E.g. <A href=http://portal/site> Company Name Enterprise Gateway Portal</A>

Search harvests anchor text from HTML anchor elements, WSS Link Lists, SPS 2003 listings, Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2007 (files using Open Office XML File Formats)
Any other File Types handled by installed 3^rd Party iFilter components

Property Weighting

Property weighting infers that matches on a specific property value can be more relevant than other property values or in document’s body.

MOSS 2007 automatically enhances / extraction of metadata
MOSS 2007 automatic tuning
Index time implementation (occurs on index server)

Weight is part of property definition
Managed properties considered in ranking (weights can only be changed through object model); New Relevance Object Model in Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration Namespace

Configure Managed Property (managedProperty.Weight = newWeight;) or set ranking parameter on predefined documents (RankingParameter.Value)

string strURL = "http://<SiteName>";

SearchContext srchContext;

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://yourSiteName"))

{

     srchContext = SearchContext.GetContext(site);

}

Ranking ranking = new ranking(srchContext));

foreach (RankingParameter param in ranking.RankingParameters)

{

    RankingParameter lookedup = ranking.RankingParameters[param.Name];

    Console.WriteLine(lookedup.Name + ": " + lookedup.Value);

}

Unmanaged properties NOT considered in ranking.

Title Extraction

Title is a very important property of ranking and are often wrong (e.g. “Slide 1”, or “Word Template Name”) MOSS 2007 has an intelligent way of overcoming this problem. What is does, is use a text extraction algorithm that generates a shadow title. How does it find a shadow title if one does not exist? It uses the headings inside your document. These are normally displayed using text formatting such as Heading 1 or Heading 2.

Please note that this only works for Office file types, another words, the Office IFilter that MOSS 2007 search uses to pick up this information.

URL Matching

Name of a website is normally a common type of query. MOSS Search matches site name to URL equivalent.

Static Ranking

This describes the ranking that is not impacted by the content or property values for a content item.

File Type Biasing

In most search scenarios, certain file types are more relevant than others. This effects the MOSS Search relevance calculation ranks.

Order of relevancy: HTML Web pages, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, XML Files, Excel Spreadsheets, Plain Text files, List Items
See Object Model : RankingParameter.Value
IMPORTANT: You cannot add and/or remove File Types

Automatic Language Detection

Foreign language results are less relevant than results in user’s language

Index time: documents are tagged with their likely language.
Query time: MOSS Search determines users language via browsers headers (Accept-Language).

Advanced Search: User can override this default behaviour using different language.
Exception: ENGLISH is always considered as relevant as user’s language.

Click Distance from authoritative pages

NOTE: the difference between Click Distance and URL Depth. Click distance is not based on URL depth but rather on the path the user takes through pages to get to information.

Authoritative Pages (Configured in SharePoint Central Administration):

Sites linked to authoritative pages have higher relevant score.
Click distance can be improved by configuring authoritative pages in search admin. This effectively “bumps up” the a “X number of clicks site” to a one click site.
3 levels of importance and is maintained by an administrator.
Pages linked to authoritative pages are MORE relevant than pages that and is adjusted until rank of all pages is influenced by its “click distance” to authoritative pages.
Administrators CAN demote relevance of sites.

URL Depth

Items with shorter urls are more relevant than items placed in longer URLs; E.g. http://msw/ vs http://portal/divisionalsite/ProjectSite1/MeetingSite/ .Short URLS are like prime real estate and organisations tend to allocate them to the most important content.

Relevance Metrics

· Precision@N: Avg. No. Of relevant documents in top 5, 10,etc.

· Mean Average Precision: Avg. Precision from N-1 to R

· Reciprical Rank: 1/rank of the top relevant document

· Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) : Represents ratio of current ranking to ideal

User’s Perceived Relevance

· Summarization and Highlighting : Query-dependant summarization and highlighting of hits within summary.

· Duplicate removal: Near duplicates documents are detected across index and removed at query time; can be disabled by admin

· Best Bets: Best Bets promotion IS NO LONGER PART OF ranking algorithm

· Did you mean? : Index informed spell checker; Only available for English, Spanish, French, (not sure of last language).

Optimization

· First crawl your content J

· Manage authoritative pages and demoted sites carefully

· Mine query logs to identify keywords

· Review list of descriptions, keywords, and best bets periodically as content prioritization can change over time

· Use admin object model CAREFULLY to change weight given to properties

· Features in ranking formula can also be added using object model to personalize ranking criterias:

o http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.server.search.administration.ranking.rankingparameters.aspx