Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of ThatSharepointGuy
ThatSharepointGuyFlag for Japan

asked on

SharePoint 2010 - Isolating Search Results Based On Site Collections?

Hello again, everyone.  I don't have much experience with managing Search, although I'm trying to get it under control and set everything up correctly.  

As a test, I have set up a content source and a crawl component to crawl/index a specific file share for my team (the "web team") in my organization.  However, I wanted to limit the search results with this information to only that site collection which is being searched.

So for instance, if my portal site's search (top level) is at http://tspg.sharepoint.com/search and I search for "managing alternate access mappings", it will pull up a document titled as "managing alternate access mappings.doc" that resides in the "web team" file share at \\127.0.0.1\webteam$.

What I want to do, is to hide search results from that file share UNLESS they are searching on the http://tspg.sharepoint.com/webteam/search site.  

Does this make any sense?  I need to have all content (file shares for records being stored off-server as well as sites within the farm) to be searchable, but there is some information that I would like to keep private as it could create problems if other teams got their hands on this information.

Has anyone configured this before, or is it even possible?
Avatar of Jamie McAllister
Jamie McAllister
Flag of Switzerland image

So couldn't you configure Search Scopes pointing to each site collection and configure the local search to search that scope?
Avatar of backpackerd00d
backpackerd00d

Have you got any experience with search scopes?  If so, you'll be able to create a search scope and make this available in your search mehanism.  A scope can be applied to a site collection, or a site level, or you can apply the scope in a search centre.

I believe Foundation is able to do this
Avatar of ThatSharepointGuy

ASKER

I have very little experience with Search, other than creating the Search Service Application and setting up crawl rules for when things need to be crawled.  I've never had the "need" to do it, as my administration points were mostly focused in other areas.  However, as I grow as a SharePoint administrator, I find that I want to learn more about the product and implement it on my end...it's just hard sometimes.

Right now I'm using SharePoint 2010 Enterprise (we don't have FAST, though)  but most of the options look similar to the 2007 version.

Basically all I wanted to do was to crawl a content source (private file share for the "web team" who manages all of the web servers for the customers) so that they can search it from their site.

However, I created that content source, and now you can search from anywhere...the Enterprise Search page at the top level of the server, and even in other site collections.  

Looking at the Search Scopes that you both mentioned, I created a Scope that says that it's a Content Source, and that Content Source is the "content_WebTeam" content source, and it it set to "Include".  
Then the rule for the scope says "ContentSource = content_WebTeam".

I noticed in the site collection search settings page that it allows you to set the drop downs to include these new content sources, so that you can search within them.  However, I can still go to a DIFFERENT site collection, type something that I know exists in the file share, and it will display there.

It all boils down to security...
Public Relations folks should be the only folks about to search the Public Relations file share from SharePoint.
Legal should only be able to search the Legal file share from SharePoint.

Neither of them should be able to get results from the other's share (so, Legal will never get hits from Public Relations, and Public Relations will never get a hit from Legal's documents)...yet I also want each of them to be able to search everything else in SharePoint.

I don't know if I'm explaining this correctly, though?  I tried reading online about it but really got a bit lost with some of it (a lot of my results on Google/Bingle were more towards "including a file share" in search, etc....not what I'm trying to actually do.

Is there something that I'm just not seeing?
If it boils down to security, the different departments shouldn't have access to the other site collections. If that were the case the search results would automatically be security trimmed and they wouldn't see anything they weren't allowed to.
JamieMcAllister,

The departments themselves don't have access to each others site collections.  However, if (for instance) the Public Relations folks have old documents on a file share that they occasionally need to access (\\fileserv\pr_share), and would like the ability to search within that share from their site collection at https://sharepoint.com/pr, they only want the results to show up on their site collection's search.

But with the way it is now, anyone on the server can search and have those documents show up.  So I can go to https://sharepoint.com/IT and do a search in the search bar on that site, and the documents form t he \\fileserve\pr_share share will show up there...and this is what we don't want.

I went digging around the net, reading about scopes, etc...but all i saw was really just how to add file shares to search (general search across the entire farm + other content sources) but nothing specific about locking down specific content sources so that their search results were ONLY RETURNED within a SPECIFIC site collection.

Even with the security trimming, my crawl account (sp.crawl.svc) has read access to the file share in order to crawl it...and anyone doing searches in the farm can read those documents in that \\fileserve\pr_share folder when pulled up within SharePoint.

So I'm obviously doing something wrong, or missing a point somewhere...I'm just not sure where I'm getting hung up at, exactly.

Without being able to isolate search results from file shares to specific site collections, I fear that the ability to add file shares as a content source is a pointless ability, with the exception that ALL documents in said file shares were meant for ALL eyes to see.

Any help that you, or anyone else, could give would be very appreciated.  Especially if someone had the resources to do a step-by-step test to see if they, too, can get this to work correctly.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Jamie McAllister
Jamie McAllister
Flag of Switzerland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
I'm still not able to limit search results to certain content sources to just one site collection.  I've tried everything suggested here and everything that I've found via Google-Fu, but nothing has worked...it may not even be possible.  I can set a search scope on a site collection so that it shows up in the search "drop down" box, and even make it the default...but doing a search on any other site collection in the farm will always return these results even though the scope for this content source is not set on the site collection doing the searching.

My apologies for letting it get to the "abandoned" stage.  I've been out of town and haven't been able to post back.  I'm going to go ahead and request closure of the question but will assign points to JamieMcAllister for his wonderful attempts at helping me figure it out.
I've given up on this for the moment being.  I haven't been able to limit search results of file shares to specific site collections, for the organizations that own each file share (ie - PR can only see the PR file share search results.  HR has a file share as well, but PR cannot see the search results for it, and HR cannot see PR's file share search results).

Marking JamieMcAllister as answerer because he did indeed further my learning on Search and scopes, etc.  Thanks!