Tuesday, June 05, 2007

SharePoint V3: Configuring the Author Managed Property

Description:

This blog post explains how to configure the Author managed property so that it may be used effectively in Search within an Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment.

Solution:

SSP Admin > Search Settings > Metadata Property Mappings > Managed Properties > Author

Step 1

Set the "Mappings to crawled properties" radio button to "Include values from a single crawled property based on the order specified." It is common to expose the Author property in search results, so don't "include all values from crawled properties mapped" because your search results will end up with mulitple names listed beside the search result and it will be difficult to distinguish which is really the author.

Step 2

Map the most relevant crawled properties to the Author managed property, and position them in the best possible sequence. Obviously, if authors are truly dilligent about maintaining the Office document Author property within the document itself , then this is best candidate for first position. However, in many organizations, this property is not actively maintained. SharePoint's Created By property isn't always an accurate indicator of who actually created the document, so this one also tends to fail as being a reliable first position candidate. In many cases, the best thing to do is to create a custom Author site column, make it required, and add it to all document content types. Then, map the corresponding crawled property as first position. This ensures that the Author information will be maintained to some degree by people touching the documents.

Once the first position is set, then add and order the subsequent crawled properties.

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