Andrew Noon's Blog

2007MOSS Search Scopes

This is my first blog in an expected series of 'gotcha' blogs.

The architectural change from 2003 to 2007 moves Shared Services into the core component set.  This means that operations like setting search scopes and audience rules move out of the portal central administration and into central shared services administration.

Doing this means that for those of us architecting, designing, deploying and developing on SharePoint have to take these design changes into account.

Down to specifics…To create a search scope in 2007MOSS you'll now need to go into the SharePoint Central Administration web application, from here if you've deployed SharePoint properly you will be able to select your Shared Services Administration web application from the quick links on the left hand side (if you accepted the defaults it will be called SharedServices1).

From search settings you can define the search scopes and rules more or less as you would have done in the old 2003 environment.  Create a scope, attach a rule i.e. add a scope called `proposal documents' then add a rule to only return results from the `proposals' content source (assuming you've created the content source already!).  All the usual caveats about updating the search scope and making sure you have scheduled updates for the content source…

The Gotcha

What isn't so obvious is how to get this scope to display in the search centre.  To do this you'll need to go to your top level portal site, making sure you're logged in as the box administrator.  In the site settings select search scopes,, notice you're scopes are NOT displayed.  This is where it gets a bit silly - you'll need to click the `Search Dropdown' hyperlink to see your scopes (not obvious) and then tick the checkbox next to your greyed out (!) scope.  You will need to do this for any top level portal site on which you want the scopes to display.

More gotchas to follow!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2007MOSS Search Scopes

This is my first blog in an expected series of 'gotcha' blogs.

The architectural change from 2003 to 2007 moves Shared Services into the core component set.  This means that operations like setting search scopes and audience rules move out of the portal central administration and into central shared services administration.

Doing this means that for those of us architecting, designing, deploying and developing on SharePoint have to take these design changes into account.

Down to specifics…To create a search scope in 2007MOSS you'll now need to go into the SharePoint Central Administration web application, from here if you've deployed SharePoint properly you will be able to select your Shared Services Administration web application from the quick links on the left hand side (if you accepted the defaults it will be called SharedServices1).

From search settings you can define the search scopes and rules more or less as you would have done in the old 2003 environment.  Create a scope, attach a rule i.e. add a scope called `proposal documents' then add a rule to only return results from the `proposals' content source (assuming you've created the content source already!).  All the usual caveats about updating the search scope and making sure you have scheduled updates for the content source…

The Gotcha

What isn't so obvious is how to get this scope to display in the search centre.  To do this you'll need to go to your top level portal site, making sure you're logged in as the box administrator.  In the site settings select search scopes,, notice you're scopes are NOT displayed.  This is where it gets a bit silly - you'll need to click the `Search Dropdown' hyperlink to see your scopes (not obvious) and then tick the checkbox next to your greyed out (!) scope.  You will need to do this for any top level portal site on which you want the scopes to display.

More gotchas to follow!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.