Accessing rank models in SharePoint 2010

I recently blogged about rank models in SharePoint 2013, and how you can use PowerShell to dump the existing rank model XML.
The commandlets to do so are more or less same as for SharePoint 2010, with one important difference, the RankingModelXML attribute is empty in 2010 (in most cases – more on that below).

$ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
Get-SPEnterpriseSearchRankingModel -SearchApplication $ssa | select RankingModelXML

RankingModelXML
---------------

Defining custom intervals for search refiners in SharePoint 2013

Refiners are a good way to narrow down your results, and often you may find that you are refining on ranges of data. A typical example from e-commerce is to limit on price ranges, where you may range from:

• 0-50
• 50-100
• 100-500
• 500-above

Out of the box SharePoint will divide the results into four box, with intervals calculated by an internal distribution formula. If we look at the file size refiner in SharePoint 2013 it will show something like this by default:

How to move your DropBox users over to SharePoint

In a recent sales meeting for a new SharePoint 2013 project I was posed with the challenge on how to cater to a large sales force currently using DropBox as a means for document collaboration.

Microsoft’s weapon is of course SkyDrive Pro, which is the new and improved Groove, or SharePoint Workspace (which I love dearly). This tool (weighing in at a 260MB, compared to DropBox’s 17MB) allows you to sync SharePoint document libraries to a folder on your local drive.

To the savvy SharePoint user the benefits of using SharePoint as a backing storage is obvious with versioning, simultaneous collaboration, added meta data, advanced security settings, and the option for workflows etc. For a user coming from DropBox and folder structure or a file server for that matter, they probably couldn’t care less.