Configure Search in cross site publishing

Cross site publishing depends on the search to create a content source and to manage crawling for SharePoint cross-site publishing. In SharePoint, content source will specify crawling in SharePoint farm. By default, after creating the search service application content source will be created in SharePoint farm.

We can re index content source that contains the catalog for changes to be added to the search index. We can re index the catalog content by using the steps below,

Navigate the library/list and go to settings page. Click on Advanced settings in General settings section.

Click on Reindex List link in Advanced Settings Page Reindex List section. And click on Reindex List to confirm to the catalog to be reindexed during the next crawl, click on Ok.

Cross site publishing in SharePoint 2013 - Part II

In my previous post I have mentioned how to create Publishing site collection and authoring site collection and activate cross-site publishing feature. After configuring cross-site publishing, we need to set up new term set and terms and have to make that available for tagging the content. If we use Product Catalog template to create authoring site collection and create the term set in the site collection, we don’t have to tag the content because by default new term sets created for product catalog site collection will be available for tagging the content.

We can make the term set available for tagging content as shown below,

Navigate to Authoring site, Site Settings page and Click on Term store management link in Site Administration section.

In TAXONAMY TERM STORE section, click on the term set that we want to make available for tagging. Click on INTENDED USE tab and select Available for Tagging and click on Save.

To create the catalog content using lists, we have to create site columns for the lists to maintain the catalog content. Because we can create managed properties automatically and use them when defining the queries for catalog content on the publishing site. If we have many lists, we can use site content types for each list.

We have to share the list/library as a catalog when we are done with creating site columns. We have to activate Cross-Site publishing feature to share list/library as catalog. By default, Anonymous access will be enabled when we share a list/library a catalog. If we don’t want anonymous users to view and search the content we need to disable the anonymous access.

To share library or list as a catalog,

Navigate to list/library and click on List/Library tab on the ribbon. Click on Library settings in the Settings group.

Click on Catalog Settings link in Settings page General Settings section.

Select Enable this library as a catalog check box in Catalog Settings page Catalog Sharing section.

If we don’t want anonymous users to view and search the content click on Disable anonymous access in Anonymous section. Select five fields for unique identity in list or library and click on add in Catalog Item URL Fields section Available field’s box. These will be appearing as friendly URL’s after connecting the publishing site to catalog. Select associated columns with term set in Navigation Hierarchy section to use navigation term set for catalog pages. and Click on OK.

Shredded storage in SharePoint 2013

Shredded storage, one of the new feature in SharePoint 2013. In SharePoint, documents can be stored in a library and will be saved in Content DB as BLOB (Binary Large Objects). RBS is a set of API that gives us option to move BLOB out of SQL server content DB.

In SP 2010, BLOB allows us to improve storage performance. If we have enabled the version history, each version of the document can be saved in BLOB. That means, each new version will create a new document in DB. If we are working with 10 MB document, for 10 versions it will take 100 MB storage. If we change the metadata of the document, a new version will be created. So user changes any metadata of the document, a new version will be created in BLOB storage without changing anything in the document. There is unnecessary of document read when we change/upload the office documents in SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint shredded storage makes BLOB in to chunks by using the number of shreds. So BLOB will be divided in to large number of shreds. By using Shredded storage architecture we change the document, only the differences will be saved. Suppose we have a versioning enabled a document library and user changes the document, only changed shreds are added in to the storage point. Shreds will associate with the previous entries instead of creating new. By using shredded storage method, instead of using 100 MB in the above example we can just use 20-25MB of storage. It also reduces the amount of information that a file to be retrieved by the web server from DB that results efficiency in Input and Output.

By default shredded storage is enabled. We can enable or disable the shredded storage at web application level or site level. We can enable the shredded storage by using web service, FileOperationSettings property of the web application. We have three options for the shredded storage, UseWebSetting, AlwaysDirectToShredded, NeverDirectToShredded. Shredded storage is independent from RBS. We can use RBS with or without using shredded storage.