Finding documents in Sharepoint online/Office 365 can be tedious. If you want to restrict your search to certain document types (like: reports, inquiries, CVs, sales orders, invoices) you either end up with too many irrelevant search hits or relevant documents don't show up because they don't include the search term. If you rely on Sharepoint's fulltext search capabilities only, then your users will be frustrated and spend too much time to find the right documents.
You can provide your users with a better search experience if you use search refiners. Users can further refine their search result by clicking on the refiner values, e.g. to retrieve "sales orders" or "invoices", only. Before you are able to create meaningful search refiners, you have to arrange for a couple of pre-requisites which include tagging documents with tags. This guide shows you how to automatically tag documents with their type (e.g. invoice, sales order, cv, inquiry) and how to provide search refiners that contain these document types.
Frustrating search experience without meaningful refiners:
Entering the search term "order" returns a lot of irrelevant documents (e.g. a CV) and even misses some sales order documents.
Better: filter documents by type, language, etc:
If you provide search refiners, then the users will be able to precicely filter for all "sales order" documents, for instance.
Steps to improve your search experience with meaningful refiners:
1. Create a termset with your document types
- Open the termstore manager (from the site settings)
- Create a new termset, named "document types"
- Create a term for each document type that you keep in your document library, e.g. inquiry, invoice, sales order, resume
2. Create a column for your document library that contins the document types
- Open the document library
- Open the library advanced settings
- Click on "create column"
- Enter the name of the new library column, e.g. "document type"
- Select "managed metadata" as type
- In the term set settings: select the termset "document type" (from the step above)
- Click on "Save" to close the form
3. Manually tag a couple of documents as examples (not all!)
- Open the library settings and add the new column "Document types" to the default view of the library
- Open the "Quick Edit" view of the library.
- Populate the field "Document types" with meaningful values for a couple of documents per document type. It is not necessary to provide each document with a tag, but the more examples you provide, the better the results will be. You should achieve a coverage of 20% of all documents per document type (and at least 10 examples per document type).
4. Install the Easy Tagging App from the App Source (free evaluation!)
- Open the site settings and click on "Add an App"
- Click on "Sharepoint Store"
- In the Sharepoint Store: enter "diqa" as search term
- Click on the "Easy Tagging" card to initiate the installation.
5. Launch the app and grant it the requested permissions
- Open the site contents again where you should find the newly installed Easy Tagging App
- Click on the App and grant it the requested permissions.
- The configuration page of the app opens in a new tab.
6. Connect the Easy Tagging App with the IDAS service
1. In the configuration page of the Easy Tagging App: click on the "Predictors & Taggers" tab
2. Click on the link "Click here to connect to IDAS"
Teach a "Learn Tags" perdictor to learn from your examples
Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.
Create a tagger that automatically creates tags for all documents (and future documents)
Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.
Update the search schema
Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.
Create an Enterprise Search Center
Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.
Add the new refiner to the search page
Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.
Verify the refiner values
Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.