We are using Microsoft Dynamics CRM but a lack of Google like search engine is crippling our productivity. We have nearly 10 years of data but without a good search engine we end up rediscovering solutions.
I was wondering if it is possible to integrate custom Google search to our MS dynamics CRM? If it is possible, how do I go about solving this problem? Any pointers would be helpful.
You can implement a Google/Web search fairly easily by using an HTML web resource. Just go to the search engine you want to use, type in some search text and search for it. From the search results copy the URL. If I search Google for "bacon", this is the URL I get -
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=bacon&pbx=1&oq=bacon&aq=f&aqi=g5&aql=undefined&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=1252l1954l0l5l4l0l0l0l0l238l673l0.3.1l4&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=707818aceea98c40&biw=950&bih=934
In the HTML web resource, you now just need to create a textbox and a search button and wire it up so that when you hit search it generates the URL above replacing "bacon" with whatever was typed in the search box. You can use a javascript window.open(url); to get it to spawn the window with the search results.
Don't know too much regarding a custom Google search, but Leon Tribe (a MVP) has posted a couple of blog posts recently on how to create what he calls a "universal search" facility in CRM - all done using the standard configuration tools within CRM (no custom code required).
It still uses the built in CRM search logic, but rather than searching only across an individual entity, his solution provides an ability to search across multiple entities (including custom ones) from a single search query.
Possibly not the ultimate answer to your problem, but might give you some ideas on something relatively simple to setup, with some degree of improvement, while you investigate more comprehensive options.
The links to his blog posts as follows:
http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2011/06/slightly-more-elegant-codeless.html
http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2011/06/codeless-universal-search-for-dynamics.html
Related
I'm trying to integrate the new Microsoft Knowledge API to my app. I need to search in the database to find results similar to a google/bing search.
So far I've made this request - and its working well:
https://westus.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/academic/v1.0/evaluate?expr=And(W=%27bandwidth%27)&attributes=Id,Ti,Y,D,CC,E&subscription-key=MY-API-KEY
According to the documentation W argument is searching only in the title and the abstract, I need to search at the whole paper.
How can i query a sentence from the database?
I work on Academic Knowledge API!
The major role of Academic Knowledge API is to enable semantic search over knowledge graph. For keyword search experience, we are leveraging the full power of Bing Custom Search, a separate service in Microsoft Cognitive Services. You can see how the two APIs can be combined at our Microsoft Academic website using the query like "how to jump higher playing basketball"
We're considering offering Bing Custom Search + Academic Graph as an additional outlet to our Academic Knowledge API!
I am working on creating a dashboard with web analytics. Here, I need to get most used search keywords in SharePoint online.
I know that I can get top search keywords in Popularity Trends and Search reports. But what I need is getting most used search key words in to a list which I can show them using a data view web part Or any other option.(like web part or java script)
Appreciate if any one can help me.
Thank you
We are currently using a number of open source and commercial products to store different type of information (in our internal network). All these products come with their own repositories (usually a database) and their own search capabilities and store different type of information.
Currently the list of products is as follows:
Wordpress
Jira
Confluence
Sharepoint
Dynamics AX
Moodle
The problem we are facing is that when one needs to search for information, one needs to login into all these different systems and execute a search on each one.
I Googled for "search engine frontend", "meta search engine", etc. but i was not able to find something obvious that solves our problem. At this point, i have to say that we are not interested in building one "central repository" to be searched, but instead we are in need of a frontend that will accept the query from the user, "package it" to the format that each of the individual search engines understand, receive the respone (JSON or XML) and present it to the user
Any suggestions on how we could solve it?
Your strategy is right: If you are not interested in building a central index, you will need an application that accepts the query from the user, converts it to the format that each of the individual search engines understand, receives the responses and presents them to the user. This is exactly what a meta search engine does. Even if you use a framework (e.g. Carrot2), much work will probably remain to write those query and result transformers, and you will probably experience slow results because the meta search can never be faster than the underlying search modules of the components you search through.
Instead of querying each backend separately you can put your data into one backend.
You could export your data to a Apache Solr server and use a frontend like CorePages, http://www.corepages.biz . You could add a backlink to your data so you can directly jump to your search result entry, f. e. a Jira Ticket or a wiki article.
We are researching the various options that exist in our environment to create an Employee Directory. We have a SharePoint portal, AD and recently moved from Lotus Notes to Exchange. Our current employee search is a custom Notes DB that has since been retired.
Since moving to SharePoint an year ago, we've used a custom list using SharePoint Profiles that are updated from AD. But the simple list interface isn't very user friendly and is very slow. Sone of the requirements include type-ahead, pictures, and details of skills/certifications and other demographic information etc. We are considering building an ASP.NET or SilverLight application that can consume the information in the SharePoint list. With the introduction of Outlook and the Global Address List, we are now wondering if it might be easier to build something within Outlook.
Has anybody traveled a similar path and what would you advice us to do?
Microsoft has a huge set of offerings for Collaboration and Social Computing in Sharepoint.
See this document, pages 8 and 9 for information about features related to an employee directory, including details of skills/certifications and other demographic information.
A la carte availability of individual features (such as People Profiles and People Search) and pricing may be an issue, but you may want to look into buying something rather than building it (if you can get the pieces you want for a price you can afford).
Sharepoint can connect with Outlook to keep the lists synchronized if you want to use outlook. And there are definitely a lot of different ways to change the way the lists are presented in the Sharepoint portal to make them more user-friendly. Having those details on the portal will certainly be a boon when combined with the powerful search and indexing features in SharePoint so you can identify employees based on their profile details easily.
We use the people search for this pretty effectively. We populate data in AD, then connect profile properties to AD attributes. That's only if you have MOSS, though. If you're working with WSS, you'll have to build something more custom.
One gotcha, though, is that the People Search out of the box doesn't easily do partial searches (i.e. searching for "john" doesn't match "johnson"). That's a big downer in my mind. You can use Ramon Scott's approach of a Content Editor Webpart with a form and some Javascript to work around it, and you can also get there via the advanced search box (albeit indirectly), but it sure would be nice if it were easy to make the default search box do partial name searches.
I recently just discoverd a somewhat easy visual basic script that draws information from the active directory where you can specify which OU to draw from where it displays all user information in a simple .HTM page. it includes a search bar, recognizes patterns (address) (company telephone number) etc... If you would like i can post it for you. you only need to fill in a few sections (display name for directory, OU, OU display, and tags) and you can always change the way things look too.
This should be taken care of by using the My Site feature that's available within SharePoint. You will then be able to search SharePoint users by skills, certifications, projects, and educational qualification.
Please refer to the SharePoint Planning and Deployment material on TechNet for more info.
SH.
Are there any blogs, guides, checklists, or controls we should be using to ensure our SharePoint implementation is accessible?
Preferrably to the W3C double A standard, or as close to that as we can get.
We're implementing an extranet solution.
This study has already been funded by Microsoft, and unfortunately the results only seem to be online in a Word Document.
The document is hosted on this blog:
http://blog.mastykarz.nl/best-practices-for-developing-accessible-web-sites-in-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007/
And the path to the document is here:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=121877
I'm unsure on whether it would be a good thing to copy the contents of that into here to fully answer the question in a way that will be indexed by search engines, but I'll play safe as it's not my content.
The best place to start is the Accessibility Kit for Sharepoint. With this, you may reach single A standard, but in my experience, you will find it very tough to reach AA.
Microsoft didn't factor in accessibility in Sharepoint, and even 2007 suffers from a huge overdependence on table layout.
Good luck!
How are you deploying the implementation? Is it as an Intranet, or, is it as a public facing website.
I think one of the first rules is to be extremely selective with the use of out of the box web parts. Many of the web-parts I looked at weren't compliant even on a basic level.
Andrew
The best way is to run checks as you develop so you know where your pain points are.
The next step maybe to start with a minimal masterpage so you can choose what elements are presented to the user.
More advanced you can override the render methods to remove or change bits of the page that are not compliant with your checks. EG changing the case of tags (XHTML does not like all caps)
A bit more in this guide.
http://techtalkpt.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/building-accessible-sharepoint-sites-part-1/
http://techtalkpt.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/building-accessible-sharepoint-sites-part-2/
I recently read the MOSS book by Andrew Connell (www.andrewconnell.com) and it has a chapter dedicated to accessibility and SharePoint sites.
Simply put SharePoint sites are very difficult to generate W3C AAA standards, but the Accessibility Kit is one of the best starting points.
Stronly recommend his book for this chapter (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470224754?tag=andrewconnell-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0470224754&adid=18S6FKQJR5FZK56WHH6A&)
It depends how much of Sharepoint out of the box you are intending to use. In implementing our public facing site we managed to achieve AA compliance, although the amount of custom development required has raised questions over the benefits we are actually gaining from using Sharepoint in the first place.
A few pointers:
We made heavy use of SPQuery/SPSiteDataQuery to render site data to screen using xslt which gave us full control over the output. I found this link helpful:
http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/02/25/xml-results-using-spsitedataquery-in-sharepoint.aspx
Check out RadEditor for Sharepoint for a nice accessible rich text editor for publishing.
For xhtml compliance, things were a little more tricky, we had to override most of the Sharepoint publishing controls' render methods to correct dodgy output.
If you are wanting to leverage the portal like capabilites of Sharepoint in your extranet it is more problematic. The web part framework is not accessible and I have not yet found a way to make it so. Any suggestions welcome!