Update Managed Property & Manually Re-Index a SharePoint Library

The SharePoint crawler picks up content that has changed since the last crawl and updates the search index.

When you change a managed property or when you change the mapping of crawled and managed properties then the site must be re-crawled before he changes are reflected in the search index. Since changes are made in the search schema and not to the actual site, the crawler will not automatically re-index. To make sure that the changes are crawled and fully re-indexed, you must request a re-indexing. The site content will be re-crawled and re-indexed so that you can start using the managed properties in queries, query rules and display templates.

In my case I updated several managed property. After the update a re-indexing of the SharePoint library was required for the items to show up in the search.

Mapping the Managed property with the Crawled property

• In the Central Administration go to the Search Service Application.
• Go to Search Schema
• Search for you Managed Property

• Click on property in the search results.
• Make the property Queryable so that this appear in search items
• Click on the "Add a mapping" button and map with the crawled property

[Note: you can do the mapping other way around too.. By searching the crawled property and map the managed property to the crawled property, depending on your scenario]

• Save changes

Re-Indexing the SharePoint library

• Go to the  library settings page of the target SP library.
• Select Advanced settings
• Scroll down and click on the "Reindex Document Library" button
• Click on "Reindex document library" button as shown below

• The re-indexing will happen in the next scheduled crawl.

Deploying People Search - SharePoint 2013

Now that we have configured the Search Service Application and created the search center next up is deploying people search. Here is how it goes.

Step 01 - Grant Access for an account to crawl the profile store

Navigate to Manage Service Applications in the Application Management. Click to highlight the Search Service Application. Click on the “Administrators” in the ribbon. When the dialog box pops up, add the intended user account.  Make sure the user has permissions to Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers. Click "OK" when done.

                                                                                                                                                           
                                                               
Step 02 - Create crawl rule

Navigate to create a new crawl rule (Search service application > click Crawl Rule > New Crawl Rule).

The quick launch in the search service application page contains the link.

[search service application page quick launch]

[Manage Crawl Rules page]

Provide the path to the start address of user profile service application. The format would be sps3://<hostname> where host name is the URL for the web application in which the My Sites site collection is deployed.

Select “Include all items in this path”

In the authentication section you can either keep the default content access account or provide the one you gave administration permission. This basically depends on your requirement. In order to give authentication for the user which you prefer, select "Specify a different content access account"  and provide account name and password.

Note that the "Do not allow basic authentication check box is selected by default". This allows user credentials to be encrypted before sending, which is the preferred approach unless you are using SSL to encrypt traffic.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  
Step 03 – Remove the profile store URL from the default content source
Navigate to Manage Content Source page. Click on the default content source "Local SharePoint site" which was created by default.

In the Start address list, remove the URL for the profile store ( sps3://<hostname> ) and click "OK".

Step 04 – Create a content source to crawl the profile store

In the "Manage Content Sources" page click "New Content Source"

• Type crawl name
• Provide Start address in the format sps3://<hostname>
• Select "Crawl everything under the hostname for each start address"
• You can choose between the continuous and incremental crawl depending on your business requirement.
•  If you are specifying the incremental crawl, setup a schedule for it.
• Set the content source priority.
• Click "OK"

Now the configuration is done ! User profile crawl is independent of the local sharepoint site crawl.

Make sure the user profile synchronization is setup (this is discussed in an earlier post.)

As for the first time, you can click on the drop down arrow of the newly create Profile Store content source, and start a full crawl.

Once the crawl is done you can go to the search center and try out the people search.

Creating a Search Center - SharePoint 2013

This post is a walk through to create a search center in SharePoint 2013

Site creation Steps


In central admin go to Application Management and select Create site collections. Note that the search center is the top level site of a site collection.

In the Create Site Collection page:

1. Select the web application
2. Type in the Title & description
3. Specify the URL for the search center
4. In the template selection, click on the Enterprise tab

If you are using SharePoint foundation 2013, select Basic Center template else
If you are using SharePoint Server 2013, select Enterprise Search Center template

Specify the primary and secondary administrators


Specify the primary and secondary administrators
In the quota template, select "No Quota" (The search center site is not meant to be a data repository, hence no quota is needed)
Then Click “OK”

The site is created !!


Permissions

In order to grant permissions for the users navigate to the search center site, and click on the Settings gear on the top right hand corner of the site. Select "Shared with…"

In the shared with dialog click on "Invite people link"
When the "Share" dialog appears specify "NT Authority\authenticated users" under "Invite People to Read"
Set the permission level give "Read" access

Update My Site Settings

Go to the My site settings page (Navigation: Central Admin > Manage Service Applications > User Profile Service Application > Setup My Sites). 

In the preferred search center section provide the URL for the created search center. This will allow searches carried out from my site profile page to use the created search center.

SharePoint 2013 Search Service

I would like to blog a bit of what I know on the SharePoint 2013 search in the coming posts. Will start off by creating the search service. So here are the steps.

Step 01 - Creating the search service

In the central admin page, select “Manage Service Applications” under Application Management.
Then, in the Service Applications tab, select “New” drop down and select, “Search Service Application”

                                                                                                                                                                                                     
In the create dialog specify:

1. Search Service application name
2. Specify the service account
3. Application pool for Search Admin Web Service
• Specify the security account
4. Application pool for Search Query and Site Settings Web service
• Specify the security account 

Once the search service is created you will be able to see the search administration service along with the search service in the servises listing.

                                    
Step 02 - Configure

Specify the default content access account. By default the name you specify at search service creation is set as the content access account.

Step 03 - Create Content Sources

When the Search service application is created a content source named “Local SharePoint sites” is created. This is configured to crawl all sites in the local farm.
To create a new content source in the Search service application, click content sources and select “New Content Source”.


Provide:
1 Content source name
2 content source type
3 addresses one below the other
4 Crawl schedule (Full and incremental)
5 content source priority

                                                                                                                        
                                              
Step 04 - Set Crawl rules
Crawl rules can be explicitly set for either exclude or include site from the crawl.