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Ontolica Solves Wildcard Search in MOSS 2007
By Jeff Tincher (33 posts -- read other by posts Jeff Tincher)
Source: FotoliaOk, how many of you out there have created a MOSS Search Center Site to find out that when you are done you AND your users cannot search using wildcards or partial names? I know I was one of them! I am working on a solution right now with one of our customers to migrate their old Company Phone Directory and use SharePoint Search features to find the employees information. The original phone directory was difficult to manage and update, the new solution was to build Custom SharePoint Lists for each department and populate those lists with required information such as, first name, last name, email, work phone, mobile phone, department, title, and a few others.
Take One
The first take on this project I set up a Search Center and had everything working, someone would search for an employee by name, title or department and BANG up comes the information. Well….sort of. The downside was what is the user searching for someone didn’t know how to fully spell a last name, like Koeningsberg for example. If they tried to do, ‘Koen’ nothing showed in the results. Hmm, why is that? Well there is no out-of-the-box wildcard search for MOSS. Not good.
Of course I searched on different solutions for searching on partial names in the search field. One potential solution was to create our own custom webpart that would interact with the internals of SharePoint. Nope. Not going to mess with that, especially after all the blog articles said, “It’s best not to mess with your own webpart and screw up your MOSS install”.
Back to searching for a Search Solution.
I’m now frantically searching for a solution to allow wildcards or partial name searches and stumble onto this company called Mondosoft with a product called Ontolica. Better news, they have a free SharePoint add-on called Ontolica Wildcard for MOSS 2007. (download here)
What this add-on does is enables Search to accept wildcards and other search features. A snippet of what Ontolica says about their product:
Enables a user to substitute one or more letters of a search word with an asterisk. Visitors can search effectively for names and products without knowing the exact spelling, by doing so, you ensure that no opportunities are lost.
I will go into that more in another blog post, but for now I am going to overview my experiences with the installation of Ontolica Wildcard. The install is pretty straight forward,
- Install Ontolica for MOSS 2007 as described in detail. The Wildcard solution is shipped with Ontolica Search by default.
- After installing go to the “Operations” tab in “Central Administration” and click on the “Manage Ontolica Licenses” item under the “Ontolica for SharePoint” section.
- This page contains an overview of the installed licenses. Locate the Wildcard license and open the context menu for this item. Click on the “Set as active license” to use this license.
- Done! You are now running the free unlimited Wildcard edition of Ontolica for MOSS 2007.
Once installed you can then create a new SharePoint Site and you’ll see a new site template in the list for Ontolica Search Center. Just create the site like any other site and it will be up and running.
I’ll get more into the customizations of the search center in a Part Two post so stay tuned.
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