Suman Chakrabarti - SharePoint and ASP.NET blog : Search

OpenSearch provider for MOSS search

Suman Chakrabarti — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 03:13:19 GMT

It's nice to have that handy-dandy search bar in the upper right corner of your Internet Explorer browser, but how do you get that to show up with custom searches for MOSS?

Well, you'll need to build a custom opensearch provider for your MOSS site. For this instance, I will demonstrate a simple provider that you will add to your page layouts to direct searches to your main search.

First, we must make the OpenSearch XML. If you want a quick cheat, you can go here to use the IE search providers add-in. So, you'll need to create a file for each search provider you want to add to your page (i.e. All Sites, People, Intranet, Extranet, etc.).

IntranetSearch.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1"> <ShortName>This text appears in the IE dropdown</ShortName> <Description>This is the description</Description> <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding> <Url type="text/html" template="http://search/searchcenter/pages/results.aspx?k={searchTerms}" /> </OpenSearchDescription>

Next, you'll have to add this to a common location that you will reference with the search provider.

Open SharePoint designer.
Create a folder called IESearchProviders (the name is unimportant).
Copy all your OpenSearchProviders in the folder.

Finally, you'll need to go to your page layout. If you're like everyone else who customizes SharePoint, then you have a custom master page as well as custom page layouts. In any page layout (*.aspx) or master page (*.master) add the following link tag to the PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead content placeholder:

<link title="This appears in IE dropdown as a new search type" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" rel="search" href="/SearchCenter/IESearchProviders/IntranetSearch.xml" />

Another scenario is to build an HttpHandler for the OpenSearch provider. This would allow you to programmatically modify the search results. Maybe you want to put the <link> tag on your master page so it appears on all sites, but you want the user to be able to define a search at the simplest of levels (as low as a document library).

Update:

I seemed to have forgotten to mention how to add a button to the page to provide the user an easier way of knowing that the search provider exists

window.external.AddSearchProvider(http://search/SearchCenter/IESearchProviders/IntranetSearch.xml)

MOSS Profile Search LDAP query to remove disabled and service accounts

Suman Chakrabarti — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:28:00 GMT

To put together the right query to get users that are not disabled accounts nor service accounts, you will need to add the following parameters to the query.

Update: I found a better approach to removing disabled accounts

(!userAccountControl:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2) - removes disabled accounts
(!userAccountControl=65536) - removes accounts with password set to never expire

Your LDAP string should look something like this:

(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)(!userAccountControl:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2)(!userAccountControl=65536))

For more ADSI userAccountControl flags go here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa772300.aspx

Notes on Lotus Notes Search in SharePoint

Suman Chakrabarti — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 03:27:00 GMT

Links to configuration of Notes search in SharePoint
TechNet: Lotus Notes Configuration for SharePoint Search

If you're looking for migration from Lotus Notes I'm still investigating, but here is the location of the Migration from Lotus Domino.

There is a nice step-by-step for indexing Lotus Notes databases on SharePointBlogs.com (the one mistake in the demonstration is that they do not enable the security trimming, which is a must have):
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/helloitsliam/archive/2007/01/09/17654.aspx

I also found a great article by Mei Ying on how to configure Lotus Notes search to display the proper title for an indexed item rather than a garbage name:
http://meiyinglim.blogspot.com/2007/01/displaying-correct-titles-of-lotus.html

What do I have to do to configure SharePoint Search?
It's important to note that SharePoint Search is already setup to handle Notes database searches. All that really needs done to setup SharePoint is install the Lotus Notes client on the server and configure an account to access databases. Then run a utility in the SharePoint program files directory called NotesSetup.exe and configure the mappings database to apply security trimming. It's importnant to note that SharePoint search requires that the customer have a mapping database from Notes IDs to Windows domain account IDs for this security trimming to work.

Some features of SharePoint search that are important to note:

Indexing of notes databases (like mail, archive mail, journal, contacts, calendar etc.) which are cached locally. Database file could be lying anywhere on the disk.
Vast set of properties (Message Body, Subject, From, From Name, From Address, To Name, To Address, CC Name, CC Address, Doc Title Prefix, Sent Date, Received Date, Primary Date, Attachment Names and whether mail is having attachment) are supported to perform search on mails.
Property based search is also supported for Calendars
UI support to add/select/deselect file for indexing. Handles well the change in names of database files, deletion of database files and movement of database files.