Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints

Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints

Overview of this book

SharePoint is an incredibly powerful platform that can support a wide variety of business scenarios. In many cases it needs to be configured or extended in order to deliver fully featured business solutions. While some books merely talk about the capabilities of SharePoint in general and leave you to figure out how they apply to your situation, this book takes a different approach. Each chapter provides easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions along with screenshots to help build exciting SharePoint business solutions that extend the platform. By the end of this book the reader will be a SharePoint developer to be reckoned with. This book will dive into a diverse set of real-world scenarios to deliver sample business solutions that can serve as the foundation for your own solutions. This book draws from the author's extensive experience with SharePoint to leverage the platforms underlying services to provide solutions that can support Social Collaboration, Content and Document Management, as well as project collaboration. Each chapter represents a new business solution that builds on the overall platform to deliver more complex solutions and more advanced techniques. By the end of the book the reader will understand how to leverage the SharePoint platform to build their own business solutions.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 9. Building a Site Directory with SharePoint Search

A common challenge for many SharePoint users is finding sites with content that is relevant to them. It is pretty common to find environments with hundreds if not thousands of sites. In past versions of the product, there was a Site Directory feature that was available, but it was essentially just a SharePoint list which required manual entry and significant maintenance, which ultimately made it a pretty unreliable and ineffective solution.

This chapter will provide some alternative solutions for addressing these challenges, starting with an overview of some key concepts on how to leverage SharePoint Search to provide an optimized experience, making it easier for users to search and discover relevant sites. In addition to the conceptual overview, the following configurations and custom solutions will be covered:

  • Sites Search Scope

  • Site Directory page

  • Relevant sites Web Part

Site Directory options

There are two main approaches to providing...