My SharePoint Adventures

Requirement

Customise the enterprise search center to include ‘Department’ and ‘Office’ fields in the refinement panel.

Solution

The first thing you need to do is ensure that the metadata fields exists under your search application. You can check this by going to Central Administration -> Manage Service Applications -> Search Service Application -> Metadata Properties. If they do not exists, you will need to create them.

1. To create a new Managed Property:

Create the Department Managed property.

• Click on New Managed Property
• Name: DepartmentRefinement
• Type: Text
• Mappings to crawled properties: People(Department:Text)
• Allow Property to be used in scopes: Ticked
• Reduce storage requirements for text properties by using a hash for comparison: Ticked
• Add managed property to custom results set retrieved on each query. Note: Only the first 2 kilobytes of data is available for display by default: Ticked

Create the Office Managed Property

• Click on New Managed Property
• Name: Office
• Type: Text
• Mappings to crawled properties: People(Office:Text)
• Allow Property to be used in scopes: Ticked
• Reduce storage requirements for text properties by using a hash for comparison: Ticked
• Add managed property to custom results set retrieved on each query. Note: Only the first 2 kilobytes of data is available for display by default: Ticked

2. Perform a full crawl of your user profile database.

3. Modify the People Results page of your search center:

Modify the Refinement Panel Webpart

• Select the webpart -> Edit Webpart -> Refinement -> Filter Category Definition
• Click on … to modify the xml file.
• Adding the following code to the XML file:

  <Category Title=”Department”
Description=”Use this filter to restrict results to a specific department”
Type=”Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator”
MetadataThreshold=”5″
NumberOfFiltersToDisplay=”4″
MaxNumberOfFilters=”50″
SortBy=”Frequency”
SortByForMoreFilters=”Name”
SortDirection=”Descending”
SortDirectionForMoreFilters=”Ascending”
ShowMoreLink=”True”
MappedProperty=”DepartmentRefinement”
MoreLinkText=”show more”
LessLinkText=”show fewer”    />
<Category Title=”Office”
Description=”Use this filter to restrict results to a specific office location”
Type=”Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator”
MetadataThreshold=”5″
NumberOfFiltersToDisplay=”4″
MaxNumberOfFilters=”50″
SortBy=”Frequency”
SortByForMoreFilters=”Name”
SortDirection=”Descending”
SortDirectionForMoreFilters=”Ascending”
ShowMoreLink=”True”
MappedProperty=”Office”
MoreLinkText=”show more”
LessLinkText=”show fewer”    />

•  Click Ok to close the editor
• Uncheck the box – Use Default Configuration
• Save all your changes.

Your people refinement panel should now look something like this:

Found an excellent post about customizing the search center.

http://blog.drisgill.com/2010/09/converting-custom-sharepoint-2010.html

I was able to follow the instructions and integrate the Enterprise Search Center with our Intranet branding.