MOSS offers a Live Search or Federated content searching, but sometime you'd like to search for content based on Site Column metadata values. To do so there are several steps to insure your content is searchable.

Let's walk through a scenario. I have a web application with a site column "InvoiceCompany". This column is associated to a Content Type.

Site Column

Shared Services Administration

In my Central Administrator, in the Shared Services Administration, we'll look at and adjust some Search Settings.

Metadata Property Mappings - Managed Properties

Let's take a look at some important items in the Managed Properties. We'll get there from the Metadata property mappings page.

A property has mapping(s) to site columns.

Edit Managed Property

In the Metadata Property Mappings page we'll find the "InvoiceCompany" that was created in my web applications. SharePoint adds the "ows" prefix to the Property Name and "ows_" to the Mapping name.

Edit Crawled Property

If we explore further in the ows_InvoiceCompany mapping we'll see the property details.

Metadata Property Mapping - Crawled Properties

In order to search for a piece of content in your farm the content must be crawled. In this scenario, we're going to make sure we automatically generate a new managed property in the SharePoint category.

Crawled Properties View – SharePoint

The SharePoint Crawled Property category contains many crawled properties, possibly the most of all the categories. A crawled property will automatically be created for every content type and column name. Automatically generated crawled properties in this category begin with "ows"prefix as shown in this image.

Configure Search Settings

You'll need to make sure the content is crawled via the Content sources and crawl schedules.

Manage Content Sources

The Starting Addresses is an important concept. In the illustration above we're crawling only the content on site http://server.

Advanced Search Properties Customization

To allow your users to now search on the Site Column you'll need to edit the XSLT (Properties) of the Advanced Search text box and add the PropertyDef in the PropertyDefs and ResultTypes as illustrated below.

Conclusion

Allowing your users to search via Managed Property adds some nice usability but the example above still will be require some work to customize and the rendering the results will be in the traditional Live Search result set view. For your more serious implementations you'll need the KnowledgeLake Imaging Server that will allow users to perform exact relevance searches using any combination of index values. Searches can be pre-configured and saved so that users can simply enter the appropriate index values and search across multiple SharePoint sites and document libraries. The KnowledgeLake Imaging search interface is a web part that is completely customizable to display the required document and associated index columns in either list or column mode.

For More Information

TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262933.aspx

MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms497276.aspx

MOSS, Search, metadata moss, metadata, search