Visual How Tos and Screencasts

• Creating a Custom Search Page and Tabs in the Search Center of SharePoint Server (April 2007) - Patrick Tisseghem
  The Search Center is a new type of site that is included by default in the site collection when you provision a collaboration portal. Its goal is to provide users with a customized search experience, and to replace the search box that is available at the top of the pages in the portal. There are two editions of the Search Center: the Search Center Lite and the Search Center with Tabs. The Search Center Lite is typically added to site collections where the publishing features are not activated. An example is a site collection with only team sites. The Search Center with Tabs offers a full customization using a tab-based user interface, but it requires the publishing features to be active. This is the case by default within collaboration portals. This article covers two customization options that can be performed in the Search Center with Tabs: how to add custom search pages and tabs, and, how to replace the XSLT for the search results with a custom XSLT.
  
  
• Creating and Exposing Managed Properties in the Advanced Search Page of SharePoint Server Enterprise Search (April 2007) - Patrick Tisseghem
  Lists and document libraries in SharePoint sites typically have extra columns defined for them. This custom metadata is collected by the crawler when it indexes the contents of these containers. Administrators can expose this custom metadata to the users who perform search queries in the Search Center. The Advanced Search page has a property picker that can be populated with managed properties. This article explains and illustrates how to expose managed properties to the user, and also explains how developers can programmatically create managed properties.
  
  
• Creating and Exposing Search Scopes in SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Search (April 2007) - Patrick Tisseghem
  Search scopes in SharePoint Server 2007 are used to narrow the search results returned to users executing a search query. Search scopes can be shared or locally defined. You can use different rules in the definition of a search scope, from simply scoping based on a content source to more complex scoping with conditions using custom metadata. You can view search scopes in the browser with scope pickers. Scope pickers are connected to a display group listing the scopes to be displayed.
  
  
• Creating Content Sources to Crawl Business Data in SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Search (April 2007) - Patrick Tisseghem
  Think of a content source as a location containing resources that you want to crawl or index. In Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, many types of locations are accessible by default: SharePoint sites, Web sites, network folders, Microsoft Exchange Server public folders, and data exposed by using the Business Data Catalog. In this how-to we'll focus on data exposed by using the Business Data Catalog, and discuss the steps to take when creating and configuring a content source of type Business Data. We'll also review a sample of how to accomplish the steps programmatically, using some of the classes exposed in the new search administration API.