Category: SharePoint

What people are saying… Definition extraction

Today, I noticed a SharePoint Search feature I did not  know yet: I was looking for the meaning of an abbreviation using the SharePoint Search center, and at the bottom of the first page of my search results a link showed up: What people are saying. After clicking the link, it showed me a perfect definition, and links to the documents were it was found. Cool!

discovered-definition.JPG

This is what I can find in the Microsoft documentation: the Definition Extraction feature finds definitions for candidate terms and identifies acronyms and their expansions by examining the grammatical structure of sentences that have been indexed (for example, NASA, radar, modem, and so on). It is only available for English.

This means that during the crawling, the MOSS indexer is checking content for sentences like “X is ….”, and recognises them as a definition. It does not seem to be very configurable, but you can turn it off in the settings of the Search Core Results web part. Just uncheck Display Discovered Definition.

 

Switching to WordPress…

I made a tough decision today. I decided to abandon SharePoint as a blogging tool, and I am switching to WordPress.

Why this move?

  • the standard site template for blogs in SharePoint is rather limited, especially for the typical web 2.0 features (pingbacks, comments, tagging…)
  • writing content is sometimes very painful. Ever tried embedding a Youtube video?
  • there are some nice extensions (tag cloud, Enhanced blog Edition) but my hosting provider did not manage to install them properly
  • SharePoint hosting costs me money 🙂
  • I am using WordPress for our family blog and it is working great
  • my friend Gert is giving great service for the php hosting.

So if you have this blog in your feedreader, don’t forget to update the feed!

Store it in SharePoint or not?

One of the “frequently asked questions in a SharePoint course is “should I store it in SharePoint or not?”

There are some simple guidelines: these files don’t really belong in SharePoint:

  • very large files (there is a limit of 2 GB)
  • files that are linked
  • executable files

Joel Oleson posted a great overview.