Recently, I had the honor to speak at the SharePoint and Project Conference Adriatics in Zagreb, Croatia. This week, I’ll demonstrate one of my topics in a 5-part series: Connecting Project Server Data to SharePoint Search:
- Part 1 – The Story, The Background and Search in Project Server
- Part 2 – Direct Crawl
- Part 3 – Federating Project Server Search
- Part 4 – Business Connectivity Services
- Part 5 – User Experience
The Story
Last year, my Search Troubleshooting session was rated as the #1 and Nenad Trajkovski, Project MVP got the 2nd place. That was the time when we decided to make a session together this year – this is how the idea of our “Ms Search and Mr Project” session was born. The idea was to show how we can get the basic Project Server concepts (tasks, risks, etc.) and make available them to search in by SharePoint.
This kind of integration is very important, not with Project Server only, but with any kind of back-end systems. We have a lot of different systems, each storing different information, and your enterprise needs all of them. You have a lot of content (maybe you don’t even know some of them!) at disparate locations, structured and unstructured data as well. For example, you have documents, emails, CRM entries, project tasks and risks, database entries, etc. With search-based integration, you can create dashboards like “Customer Management” or “Project Dashboard”, but you also can view your open task aggregated from SharePoint and Project Server.
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The Background
In Project Server, we can create projects with resources, tasks, risks, etc. Everything is stored in databases and “Project Server” also has its own portal built on (what a surprise!), SharePoint technologies. The portal can be on-premises or in Office365.
The Project Server portal has its own Search solution that is a kind of “basic” Search. This can be customized on the UI (see the last part of this series), but we don’t have real “enterprise” search features – for example, we cannot crawl any other content sources therefore we cannot integrate our Project Server data into our enterprise data.
In the next parts of this series, I’ll overview how Project Server Data can be connected to the Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2013. Stay tuned:
