Todo Sharepoint: SharePoint 2010 Best Bets

viernes, 27 de enero de 2012

SharePoint 2010 Best Bets

Best Bets is enhancement to your basic SharePoint 2010 Search. Essentially, this allows you to inject chosen content at the top of search queries to searching users. An example could be that you want your twitter account link to display if someone searches for your name. Lets jump in and get this set up!
First you need to create a Search Center site, for this example I will use the Basic Search Center. Go to Site Actions -> New Site -> Basic Search Center (under search on the left). This is the same as creating any site within SharePoint 2010.

Now that you have the Search Center created, we need to go in and set up our Best Bets! Navigate to Site Actions -> Site Settings and under Site Collection Administration click go to top level site settings option. If you don't see this option then just navigate to the top level site and go to Site Settings. Once at the top level site settings, under Site Collection Administration you should see Search Keywords (shown below).

skey

You should now see a screen like the one below with options to set up keyword phrases and the like.

settings

Keyword phrase is exactly as it sounds, a keyword used for search. The Synonym part lets you technically create another keyword. For this example I used my name (Mathew) as the keyword and the synonym (Mat). So far everything is pretty simple!
Next we need to click Add Best Bet to add in our Best Bets. You can have more than one Best Bet per keyword. In the above screen shot I have created one already. If you had more than one Best Bet you could change the order they appear to the user. Clicking Add Best Bet loads the following screen.

bets

Here you have to input a URL and Title for that URL. Optionally you can also add a description, which I did not do. Once you click OK you are taken back to the previous settings page where you can set a time frame for the Best Bets to be used etc. For now let's just click OK again to be taken back to the Site Settings page.
Well that is pretty much all it takes! If we now go to our create Basic Search Center site and search for Mathew or Mat you will see the following at the top of the query.

bestsearch

The only thing that is left to know and discuss is that this will only work if the searching is done within our Basic Search Center site. Luckily, you can change the search on the Home page of your SharePoint 2010 site to use this search site as it's default search.
For this go back to the top level Site Settings and again under Site Collection Administration, click Search settings.

set