HOWTO : Matthew Cosier : Searching your SharePoint Portal from within Office

Searching your SharePoint Portal from within Office

Just a little tip that some of you might find really cool (although most of you probably already know about it - but it makes for a great blog post :>)


1. Open Word or Excel
2. Hold down your ALT key and click your left mouse button to open the Research Task Pane
3. Down the bottom of the task pane, click Research Options
4. Click Add Services�
5. Type in http://yourvirtualserver/_vti_bin/search.asmx
6. Click the Add button
7. Authenticate yourself if asked, by entering your domain credentials
8. Leave the default portal selected (or choose the one you want to search) and click the Install button
9. Click OK to close the Research options dialog
10. Within the drop down list of available research references in the task pane, choose your portal name
11. Type in your search criteria, and away you go – sharepoint search within office.


This is handy when you may be working on a document or spreadsheet and you need to perform a quick lookup on your portal – you can now do it without leaving your office environment (except for opening the result links).


And just as a technical note - the reason this works is because the query search service that sharepoint exposes returns a standard urn:Microsoft.Search.Response.Document response packet, which is defined within the urn:Microsoft.Search schemas available for download on MSDN. The Research service works directly with this schema, so when you are creating a custom Research service, this is the type of information you will be returning as your response.