New Features In SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 will, without a doubt, be a huge success for Microsoft. The SharePoint platform has come a long way and SharePoint 2013 (code named SP15) is another leap forward. Search is one of the areas where Microsoft has, once again, made huge investments and the new functionality is astounding.

New Features In SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 will, without a doubt, be a huge success for Microsoft. The SharePoint platform has come a long way and SharePoint 2013 (code named SP15) is another leap forward. Search is one of the areas where Microsoft has, once again, made huge investments and the new functionality is astounding. They have taken a great deal of the functionality of their FAST product and tightly integrated it into the SharePoint platform, molding what will finally become the leader in the Enterprise Search space. There are still some bumps along the road but, overall, SharePoint fans are going to be very pleased.

First, it is important to know that what we all know as the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint will most definitely be dropped as a SKU. The FAST product will no longer be developed (it hasn’t been touched for a couple years anyways), and FAST Farms will lose support. This is kind of bad news for anyone who has invested in FAST already but very good news for anyone who hasn’t! Some of the most important functionality in FAST and its scalability has been folded into SharePoint Search and the cumbersome structure of the FAST product is gone. This includes the 2 big value propositions of FAST; scalability, and property extraction.

However, don’t expect SharePoint 2013 search to work like FAST. Some parts of FAST will disappear, never to return, like the FAST Web Crawler and JDBC connectors.

Let’s look in detail at some of the cool new features of SharePoint 2013.

Crawler side
Native OOB PDF indexing.
When I first met Jared Spataro back in 2007, he told me that his goal with SharePoint Search was to first ‘nail the basics’. Well, Microsoft’s finally hit one of those nails on the head with native support for PDF indexing. I never meet a customer who doesn’t have PDF files and lots of them. Although the PDF ifilter from Adobe is free and 90% effective, native support is a no-brainer.

Faster Office document and PDF indexing
Not only is PDF indexing out of the box, that and office documents have their own conversion mechanism in SharePoint 2013. This is, from the metrics I’ve seen, much much faster and more reliable. You can still use, and develop your own, ifilters if you want but indexing Office and PDF content out of the box is going to be a huge improvement.

Crawl Health Reports
SharePoint 2010 had some great analytics in their Search Administration Reports. These reports covered crawl rates, crawl processing and query latency but not very well used and kind of buried. Microsoft has expanded the reporting available and given a more interesting look at your crawl activity as well as promoting this information to the top of the Search Service Application’s (SSA) menu:

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Figure 1 – The Diagnostics menu in the SSA.

You are going to see a lot deeper level of information about what your crawler is doing and it should be easier to navigate as well.

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Figure 2 – The Crawl Reports page

Federated Locations and Search scopes are combined into Results Sources
Federated Locations allows you to consume results from OpenSearch compliant search engines and a number of different sources could be added. Search Scopes gave a logical separation to the search index and allowed for pre-defined queries to be submitted. Federated Locations has been replaced with Result Sources and Search Scopes have been folded into that menu.

Result sources differ from Content Sources by not actually being crawled by this farm. What that means is that you can have results consumed from another SharePoint farm and searchable from this SharePoint farm.

Mailbox search!
Although SharePoint 2013 still only supports indexing of Public Folders, the same back end search engine will be used in Exchange and the Result Sources capability will allow you to add an Exchange index as a result source. This means users will have native search of their own mail within SharePoint. COOL!

NOTE: These results will appear in a separate results web part (perhaps best in a separate mail tab?)

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Figure 3 – Content Sources

Managed properties can be made Searchable, Queryable, Retrievable, Refinable, or Sortable
Managed properties in SharePoint 2013 get a slight overhaul. They are now set under Search Schema in the SSA. They can be set as searchable, queryable, retrievable, refinable, sortable or any combination of the three. The differentiation is made, as far as I can see to limit storage requirements.

Searchable: Includes the content of the property in the index, making it searchable as a query term alone. Documents with a searchable property on them will be returned as keyword matches.

Queryable: Making a property queryable allows you to query it using property queries such as Property:Value.

Retrievable: Retrievable properties can be returned to the result set for display or programmatic usage.

Refinable: Allows properties to be returned in refiners.

Sortable: Allows properties to be used for sorting.

New Features

Figure 4 – Managed Property options

New Features

Figure 5 – making a property refinable.

Complete matching of property values
Property queries in SharePoint 2010 were limited by a set of reserved characters and searching for terms with these characters often returned errors. Now a property can be set to have complete matching which will allow ID’s such as 12-3-45.ABC to be queried instead of recognizing the reserved terms as spaces and returning documents with 12 3 45 and ABC on them.

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Figure 6 – Complete matching feature in Managed Propeties.

Entity/Property Extraction – company and custom entities.
Another option in search schema is extracting properties from the documents, even if they are not in property fields or metadata. Out of the box, company extractions can be performed but custom entity extraction can also be set up. This will prove to be a massively useful feature and a major value add from the FAST expertise in MS.
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Figure 7 – Company name property extraction.

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Figure 8 – Custom Entity Extraction

Scalability
There’s no word on the tested boundaries of SharePoint 2013 search but we are expecting indexing capabilities in the billions of documents and unlimited scalability with impressive crawl times. Look for more blog posts from SurfRay as we get deeper into the beta release.

Query side
It’s not just the content side that’s received improvements in SharePoint 2013. On the query side a number of new features help improve the search experience including query rules, connection to the term store and new query syntax.

Query Rules
Query rules have replaced Search Keywords and allow for a number of different query handling options beyond just best bets.

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Figure 9 – Query matching conditions

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Figure 10 – Create a custom query to match a condition

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Figure 11 – Some built in query rules

Search dictionaries- Links to MMS
A new link appears in the Site Collection Administration pointing to Search dictionaries where search terms can be matched with others. This actually just links to the Managed Metadata Service and allows for terms to be matched in the term store.

New Query Syntax
A new query syntax has been implemented to allow for more logical and complicated queries. The full details of this are not yet published but doing searches from the advanced search page will actually preserve the query in the query box and the user can glean the new syntax from it.

It doesn’t look like you’ll get FAST like query language but the new syntax should make custom queries easier to manage.

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Figure 12 – A query for documents containing bees in documents and authored by guys with Gordon in their name. ALL(bees) (DetectedLanguage=”en”) (IsDocument=”True”) Author: gordon

User Interface
One of the most profound changes is the new user interface. Microsoft has really taken a departure from previous versions which were intentionally kept simple to provide a much richer experience. There is a floating information pane that can potentially provide previews of documents if the Office Web Apps Server (separate farm) is used. Here are a few of the new UI features:

Ajax UI
The user interface is now heavily dependent on javascript and inline calls to items are made in the search results. This helps to update results and show additional information without page refresh.

Visual Refiners
Refiners get an overhaul with a few new options for displaying in graphs and a search within refiners box. This can help with long lists of refiners and narrowing a date becomes extremely easy with the date slider.

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Figure 13 – new visual refiner controls.

Deep refiners with counts
The refiners in SharePoint 2013 are now deep refiners, able to count the absolute number of matches in an index. These managed properties need to be made refinable, but all items will be considered instead of the previous shallow dataset.

Video and Reports tab OOB in Enterprise Search Center
If you have the Publishing feature enabled and the Enterprise Search center deployed you will get new tabs for Video search and Reports alongside Everything (All Sites) and People. I haven’t tried these out yet but am looking forward to trying video search.

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Figure 14 – New videos and reports tabs and personal favourite promoted results.

Floating info/preview pane
We will certainly have a lot to say about the new floating info pane because it includes many features that Ontolica has been providing but in a slightly different user experience. When mousing over a result, a floating pane appears to the right of the result item with some result actions (not as many as a library item) and potentially a preview of the document. Document previews will require a separate install and likely a separate license.

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Figure 15 – The floating info pane.

In-document-library search box
Libraries now have their own search box that is submitting a contextual scoped search for that library or list allowing users much better in library search capabilities. This box also appears on the libraries page, instead of in the universal search box location, making it very handy and easy to use.

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Figure 16 – Document library search box.

Refiner selection UI in Edit Web Part Pane
A major improvement and probably my personal favourite is the extensive capabilities for adding refiners that has been added. You can now easily throw a new refiner into the refinement panel, change its name, and change its attributes without coding any XSLTs.

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Figure 17 – The refiner selection pane on the refiner web part edit pane.

Result Types
Result types is a new mechanism that will allow you to apply a particular template to a given result, meaning documents or searchable items of a different type (like people) can be displayed with a picture or different metadata

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Figure 18 – Result Type Management

Result set enhancements:
Finally, there is a number of great result set enhancement capabilities added including:
1.Promoted results – New name for best bets.
2.Social definitions – definitions for search terms appear based on content in documents.
3.Personal favorites – Items you have clicked frequently.
4.Response time – How fast the engine returned the results.
5.Language selection – Allow users to filter on languages or have default languages set.
6.Sorting dropdown – Allows for sorting of the result set based on properties.

What’s missing:

Better advanced search
Advanced search seems to be about the same as in 2010. I would have expected some of the new search UI love to be given to the advanced search page but perhaps that’s left to customize.

Configurable web crawler
We are losing the web crawler from FAST but we don’t seem to have any more configurability in the way that SharePoint crawls any content with out of the box connectors. Web sites are complicated and messy. Having some control of how it crawls beyond simple rules could be useful.

Search Result actions beyond view library and send
It’s great to see search result actions on the hover pane but these are limited to view library and send document link. Items like view properties or edit properties on the document should be included.

Preview only works on Office documents
The new Office Web Apps server preview is massively cool but only works on Office documents. First page, inline preview only works on PowerPoint. Forget about previewing your PDF documents.

Saved Searches/Alters/RSS Feeds
Apparently Microsoft didn’t think people were using alerts and RSS feeds because they are gone. Also, doing anything else with a search result is not (yet) supported. We will have to see if this stuff makes it into the final release

In result preview without additional infrastructure
Having a preview pane is a big bonus but it comes at a massive cost. The Office Web Apps Server is very hard to install and set up and will require a lot of additional infrastructure and probably licensing. Also, the hover pane is a little slow and cumbersome. It detracts from the user experience and is not terribly intuitive. Ideally there should be inline first page previews for all documents, not just PowerPoint.

Conclusion

Overall, the advancements to SharePoint 2013 search are pretty huge and this is the most impressive search product released by Microsoft yet. There are still a few gaps and I am uncertain about the adoption of the new UI but we are definitely getting closer to a true Enterprise Search experience with SharePoint.

Disclaimer: This post is based on an early Beta release so things could change in future releases so don’t take it as gospel of what will be in the released product.

For a brief video walkthrough of the new SharePoint 15 Search functionality, check out Josh Noble’s video introduction to the SharePoint 15 Search UX. For a deeper introduction to the new SP15 preview functionality please see David Gordon’s blog. Both of these as well as more blogs, quick tips, and video instruction on all SharePoint Search releases can be found at www.surfray.com.

Surfray are Silver Exhibitors at the European SharePoint Conference 2013.

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