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Sharepoint: Improve the search experience with the TermTree Refiner (September 1, 2020)

Finding documents in Sharepoint online/Office 365 can be tedious. If you have a hierarchy of terms, like product groups, series and products, then you can easily refine search results for leaf terms. But it is impossible to refine for terms that sit higher in the term tree, e.g. product groups or series. This is because the standard refinement webpart shows leaf terms, only. This frustrates your users who cannot leverage the structural information of the term store.

You can provide your users with a better search experience if you use DIQA's TermTree Refiner. This Webpart extends the standard refiner webpart and visualises the terms in the hierarchical context of the term tree. Users can select terms in the hierarchy to drill down or drill up in the search results. This webpart makes use of managed metadata. This refinement webpart has these advantages over standard SharePoint-Search:

The terms contained in the search results are presented in their tree-context
Users can easily drill-up or drill-down in the tree to broaden or narrow the search

Frustrating search experience without meaningful refiners:

The standard refiner hides important information like the position of a search hit in the term tree. Additionally you cannot filter for parent terms, like product groups.

Better: filter documents by type, language, etc:

The TermTree Refiner Webpart shows the terms in their tree-context. Users can easily drill-up or drill-down in the tree to broaden or narrow the search.

What do you need to do to achieve this improved search experience?

Download/install the TreeRefiner Webpart either for Sharepoint 2016, 2019 on premise or Sharepoint online: TreeRefiner Webpart
Create a classic search center in Sharepoint and add the TreeRefiner Webpart to it.
Make sure that your document library uses a site column of type "Managed Property" which uses a termset in the termstore.
Launch a full crawl.
Modify your search schema and create a mapping to a refinable managed property, like: RefinableString00
1. Open the search schema and click on the hyperlink “Managed Properties” to retrieve the list of managed properties.
2. Select the refinable managed property that you want to use as refiner (e.g. “RefinableString00”) and open it in Edit-mode.
3. The edit mode of the RefinableString-property contains the section “Mappings to crawled properties”. Click on the button named “Add a mapping” to open a popup

window. In the popup window, enter the string “ows_taxid” and klick on “Find” to retrieve the list of crawled properties of type “Managed Metadata”. Select in the list of crawled properties the property that corresponds to your site column. Click on “OK” to save the setting and close the popup window.

1. NOTE: If you cannot find a crawled property that corresponds to your site column, then your full crawl has not terminated yet.
Return to the search center and complete the configuration of the TermTree Refiner Webpart
Enter a search term and verify that the term tree is displayed in the webpart,

See the TreeRefiner Webpart in this video:

Step 1: Prepare your library

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).

You have now prepared everything required to teach the "Easy Tagging App" about your way to tag. You can now carry on and install the Easy Tagging App and train the "Learn Tags"-predictor.

Step 2: Automatically tag all your documents

1. 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.

Direct link to the Microsoft App Store:

▶ Got to Microsoft AppSource

2. 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.

3. Connect the Easy Tagging App with the IDAS service (1/2)

In the configuration page of the Easy Tagging App: click on the "Predictors & Taggers" tab
Click on the link "Click here to connect to IDAS"

4. Connect the Easy Tagging App with the IDAS service (2/2)

In the connection dialog: select the "IDAS Evaluation Service" tab
Click on "I accept the terms of use" tick box
If the service status says "IDAS evaluation service is available", then click on the "connect" button. If the status says something different: click on "refresh status".
The dialog closes and you can setup a predictor.

5. Launch the "Learning Wizard" in your library

After you have created a connection to the IDAS Evaluation service you can launch the "Learning Wizard" which will guide you through the process to learn from your examples and to tag your documents.
Return to your library and open the "Library Settings" ribbon.
Click on the "Learning Wizard" icon which launches the wizard in a dialog.
Go through the three steps:
1. Click on "Click to start the wizard"
2. Step 1: select the language that is used in most of the documents of the library. If you documents in other languages: just select english.
3. Step 1: in the field "Learn to predict tags from this managed metadata column": select the "document types" column that you created in the earlier steps
4. Step 2: your library is analysed for sufficient examples. If you don't have enough examples: please add further examples before you continue with the wizard.
5. Step 3: select the column which will receive the document type tags: just keep the selection.
6. Step 3: click on the link "Start Learning and Tagging".
The learning and tagging processes are running in the background.
You can inspect the progress in the library ribbon "Predictors + Taggers"

6. Important: re-index your document library

Opent the settings of your library
Click on "re-index document library"
Click on "Ok" to close the form

Now all your documents in the library have been provided with tags, and the search index is being updated in the background. You can now carry on and setup the search page that uses these tags.

Step 3: Create a search center that includes the search refiners

1. Create an Enterprise Search Center

Open the contents of your Sharepoint site and click on "subsites".
Create a new sub site by clicking on the "New" action link.
A form opens where you specify the new sub site.
In the template field: select "Enterprise/Basic Search Center".
Click on "Create" to create the new seach center.

2. Adjust the search schema: map the crawled property to a refinable managed property

Open the Sharepoint admin center for your tenant.
Click on the "Search" section
In the Search section: click on "Search schema"
In the "Search schema" settings: activate the tab "Crawled properties"
Search for all crawled properties that start with the string "ows_"
Select the crawled property that relates to your "document type"-managed property, e.g. "ows_Document_x0020_type"
Create a mapping to the managed property "RefinableString01" (or 00, or any other number).
Save the settings.

3. Add the new refiner to the search page

Open the search center
Open the search results page (named "results.aspx")
Click on "Edit page"
In the page edit view: open the property settings of the Refinement webpart
Click on the button "Choose refiners"
In the "refinement configuration" dialog: add the refinable managed propery

(from the search schema step), like: RefinableString00 (or 01 etc).

You should see sample values that contain you document types.
Click on "Ok" to add RefinableString00 to the refiner
Save the modified properties of the webpart by clicking on "OK"
Store the modified page.

4. verify the search results

Open the search center
Enter "*" as search string and submit the query
Inspect the refiner values: they should include your document types
Click on a refiner value, like "invoice", in order to restrict your search results to contain only invoices and bills.

If the new refiner does not contain values then you have to wait until the Sharepoint online search engine has completed re-indexing your library. If still no values show up then you have to go back to your library settings and click on "re-index library".

What's next?

Get the TermTree Refiner Webpart: TreeRefiner Webpart

Questions?

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Watch it here:

@@ Line 40: / Line 40: @@
 <p>
-The following steps assume that you have Sharepoint Online/Office 365 and a library that contains at least dozens of documents or scanned documents (pdf or image formats). If you are familiar with certain configuration aspects of Sharepoint then you will need 30 minutes to go them through in your tenant. If you require assistance then we are happy to help!</p>
+What do you need to do to achieve this improved search experience?
+#Download/install the TreeRefiner Webpart either for Sharepoint 2016, 2019 on premise or Sharepoint online: [[TreeRefiner_Webpart|TreeRefiner Webpart]]
+#Create a classic search center in Sharepoint and add the TreeRefiner Webpart to it.
+#Make sure that your document library uses a site column of type "Managed Property" which uses a termset in the termstore.
+#Launch a full crawl.
+#Modify your search schema and create a mapping to a refinable managed property, like: RefinableString00
+##Open the search schema and click on the hyperlink “Managed Properties” to retrieve the list of managed properties.
+##Select the refinable managed property that you want to use as refiner (e.g. “RefinableString00”) and open it in Edit-mode.
+##The edit mode of the RefinableString-property contains the section “Mappings to crawled properties”. Click on the button named “Add a mapping” to open a popup
+window. In the popup window, enter the string “ows_taxid” and klick on “Find” to retrieve the list of crawled properties of type “Managed Metadata”. Select in the list of crawled properties the property that corresponds to your site column. Click on “OK” to save the setting and close the popup window.
+## NOTE: If you cannot find a crawled property that corresponds to your site column, then your full crawl has not terminated yet.
+#Return to the search center and complete the configuration of the TermTree Refiner Webpart
+#Enter a search term and verify that the term tree is displayed in the webpart,
+== See the TreeRefiner Webpart in this video: ==
-== Watch the steps in the video: ==
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+|id=jvKEF-u5r84
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@@ Line 230: / Line 241: @@
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 ==What's next?==
-* Add refiners for the document language like: english, french, german, spanisch
+* Get the TermTree Refiner Webpart: [[TreeRefiner_Webpart|TreeRefiner Webpart]]
-** The Easy Tagging App has a built-in predictor that detects the language that is used in documents. You can simply use that predictor in a tagger to tag all your documents with the language. Similar to the steps in section 3 you would simply create another refiner that allows users to restrict their search results to certain languages.
-* Add refiners for important words:
-** The Easy Tagging App is able to identify important words from documents and store them in the termstore as a new termset. If you let the tagger tag your documents with them, then your users can use them to filter their search results.
 ==Questions?==
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 |heading=related products
 |links=
-* [[Easy_Tagging_for_SharePoint_online|Easy Tagging App]]
+* [[TreeRefiner_Webpart|TreeRefiner Webpart]]
 }}
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