Monday, August 26, 2019

Classic vs Modern and More Microsoft Search Questions Answered


imageOver the past several weeks there has been a number of community questions on classic vs. modern search in relationship to SharePoint and Microsoft Search across social channels. We selected the most common questions and created a Q&A article over at the Microsoft Tech Community to help answer those.

If you have comments or questions, scoot over to Tech Community and let us know.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Search/Classic-vs-Modern-and-More-Microsoft-Search-Questions-Answered/m-p/797933


Friday, August 23, 2019

I can see it! KQL in the house! HCWP love!

I’ve known this was coming for a while and I can finally see it in my tenant! KQL support for the highlighted content web part has finally arrived. Knock yourself out and surface content any way you want via search, (as long as the visuals cover your needs).

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If you’re really crazy and bold, target the web part to a list/library and crank out your favorite CAML queries as well – not sure why you would ever go there though :D

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Thursday, August 8, 2019

Update to using Microsoft Flow for approval of site pages

In May of last year I wrote a post which showed how you could implement approval of modern pages in SharePoint using Flow. That post was written before the edit experience implemented the Submit for approval button.

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While the built-in approval is nice, Flow approval provides easy to use actionable messages which makes approving that much easier – no need for the approver to visit the page library to actually approve the item.

In my previous post I added a step to check for the Pending status of the page before invoking a Flow approval action in order skip the Draft and Approved states which should be ignored for the Flow itself. This means Flow will trigger more than actually needed – but that was the way to go last year.

Seems the SharePoint triggers have now been updated to support trigger filters, which means the steps can be optimized a bit.

Click the ellipses (…) on the trigger and pick Settings.

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In the trigger conditions settings add the following to trigger only for items which are awaiting approval.

@equals(triggerBody()['{ModerationStatus}'],'Pending')

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In order to use the content approve action you still need to get the correct ETag, which means the Get file metadata action has to stay.

A simple auto-approve Flow would look like below.

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Happy Flowing!

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Search nugget - Grouping property restrictions within a KQL query

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Figured I’d alert you guys to a small nugget I was made aware of, and which I have officially documented at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-development/keyword-query-language-kql-syntax-reference#grouping-property-restrictions-within-a-kql-query.

The gist of it all is that you can now use parenthesis on property queries.

<Property Name>:(<Expression>)

As an example:

author:"John Smith" AND author:"Jane Smith"

can be rewritten as:

author:("John Smith" "Jane Smith")

The other cool side effect of adding () around the property value is that the term(s) will be lemmatized. The query title:page return matches with the exact term page only, while title:(page) also return matches for the term pages.

Head over to the docs to read all about it and check out some more complex samples. Start adding those parenthesis, and may the search be with you!

Note: Works for SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2019 only.