There are many ways to search in SharePoint but within the product there is one site template that is called the Search Centre. This site gives you the ability to search anywhere in your environment including other locations that we have configured in the search crawler.
When designing your SharePoint environment consider having a separate URL for search such as https://search.newwaveacademy.com. By Implementing Search Centre by its own URL staff and students know a single URL to search for any content in your establishment instead of having to navigate through other SharePoint sites.
People Search
Search Centre will also give you search results for the most relevant user in your environment. Here’s an example:
A student is working at home and is stuck on their Romeo and Juliet homework. They log onto the Search Centre and type in Romeo and Juliet.
In the search results they are given all the documents that are relevant to the search results but in the top right you are given the most relevant member of staff.
SharePoint Search will crawl MySites to see what users have been uploading in their profile. A member of staff may have identified themselves as an export in Romeo and Juliet and have set their ‘Ask me about’ to this content and others. Search has crawled this profile field and will present the user searching for this topic as a possible user to contact about this subject.
Filtering Search and Metatagging
Down the left hand side when you have searched you are given the ability the filter the search results by location, creator of the document and tags.
When uploading a document you are given the opportunity to tag the document with keywords. If I’m uploading an image that is relevant to Romeo and Juliet I may tag it with Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare and Act 1 so when searching I can see other relevant keywords to my search.
Search Centre Features
Within Search Centre we have some additional features, these include:
- Email Alerts
- RSS
- Search from Explorer
Email Alerts
Use the email alert feature to be emailed when new items have appeared in the search results. This save you having to search again to see if there any new items.
RSS
Subscribe to the search results using RSS and see the latest results in your RSS Reader.
Search from Explorer
In Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft introduced the ability to search from the start menu. From here you can search for documents, emails and applications.
Once this search connector has been add you can search the search centre from you desktop.
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