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. The outline will be:
- 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
Federating Project Server Search
Federation as a feature is not new. It is available since MOSS 2007 SP2.
With this feature, we can use any OpenSearch 1.0/1.1 remote index to get results from. For example, we can use Project Server’s own index and can provide the items remotely. And if one searches for [Agnes], the result can contain my tasks directly from the Project Server’s index:
In SharePoint 2013, we can get this functionality by creating a “Result Source”. If our Project Server is on-premise, the configuration of Result Sources is kind of obvious.
If we have Project Server online (in Office 365), configuration of the Result Source need some more attention as we have to configure the two-way-trust between our on-premise SharePoint farm and our Project Server Online with SSO directory synchronization, etc.
But be aware, besides from being a very good option in hybrid environments, ”Federation” also has some limitations. For example, federated results cannot be aggregated with the other results. On the screenshot below, the main result set and “MS Project Tasks for ‘Agnes’” cannot be merged together. Also, if you have more federated locations defined, each one will be displayed separately.
In the next parts of this series, I’ll introduce one more way to connect Project Server Data to Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2013 (BCS) as well as some tricks for UI enhancements. Stay tuned:
- Part 4 (Dec 12, 2013) – Business Connectivity Services
- Part 5 (Dec 13, 2013) – User Experience
