In this part, we will see  , how can we restore the content by exporting the old data and importing it back to the content in context.

Access the old content and export

As the data from older date is restored on the SQL server,this can be accessed from Central Admin. Ensure that the account which is opening the CA, must have access on Restored DB. Following steps can be followed.

• Open CA.
• Navigate to Back and restore page and click on “Recover data from an unattached content database” from the Granular Backup section.
• On this page, filling the information of SQL server and Database name of restored Database.If you have restore the database on different SQL server, please enter the appropriate SQL server name and ensure the operating account has access to the Database.

And click “Next”. Select the appropriate site and the list/library or site which needs to be exported

and further click Next

Click on Start Export on this page.

The export will be completed based on the size of the list,library or site.

Check the shared location and you must see a cmp extension file along with export log.

Import the Exported content to Current Site/new
Site

Now we need to import the exported data/content to the desired location. The imports just copies the data back on any site as it was exported.

The initially the list had 4 item for this demo and two of them were corrupted and had to be deleted. Now the aim is to retrieve back the data when it had all 4 images working fine.below can be predicted as current view for the list before restore with 2 items.

Following import script should be used.   
  Import-SPWeb -Identity <web application URL>  -Path <Location of exported file> -IncludeUserSecurity  
 

More information about Import-SPWeb can be found at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607613.aspx

There can be a scenario where you are asked to restore some content from old date for a List, Library of for a site on SharePoint.

Case: A user des something wrong with a List or library and is not recoverable. He needs to restore to yesterday’s data which was working to current site. There can be another case wen content is deleted and removed from recycle bin. To recover data you need to ensure that the back ups are maintained for the days from which data needs to be recovered.

Following are the steps to achieve this.

Identify the Database to be restored

First of all, we need to identify the database which needs
to be restored. Following are the steps to find that.

• Log on to CA(Central Administration)
• From Application Management, select view all
  site collections.
• Select appropriate Web Application and Site
  collection.
• Note down the Content Database as shown below

Restore the Old Back up to SQL

Open SQL server Studio and connect to the Database which can be accessed with the Farm. It is important that the DB server is in same domain. Ensure that you have logged in to the server with SysAdmin rights on the DB.

This restoration is just done temporarily to export the granular content from the database and hence it is okay to restore this on the FARM DB. Make sure you delete it from the Server once we have completed export of content.

Click onto the restore Database.Select “Device” and navigate to the bak file that should be restored from the earlier backup as shown below

Change the name of the Database in the destination section as shown below.

Change the location of the files from the “Files” tab in the left navigation of the window. Change it the temp location where the backup was kept. We will have to delete this Temp folder later, once we have completed entire process.

After this, Navigate to the “Options” tab and ensure that you have the check boxes selected as shown below for restoration of DB

Once the restore complete, you should see a success message as below

 This concludes restoration of the old data on the SharePoint Farm. Next stage of this will explain , How CA can be used to export the content to importing back on to fix the corrupted content.

For Reference, below PowerShell can be used to update the managed metadata service hub uri

Set-SPMetadataServiceApplication -Identity "Managed Metadata Sercvice" -HubUri "New URL"

Once the New Hub URI is set, It is important that the content types needs to be republished to ensure that the HUB Uri will become effective for all the content published.

Adding Thesaurus or Synonyms is one of the first things to improve search engine intelligence.  This is a mean to explain the search engine to depict a meaning for another word, abbreviation or Notation. Using PowerShell, an administrator can upload a list of Thesaurus to the Search Service application. Please note that , you will have to maintain this particular list of Thesaurus  in future, any additions should be appended to this document and then further should be uploaded again using PowerShell.

The dictionary is always overwritten, it does not append information to it.

Where can you use:

For example , when your users are searching for a business unit, they tend to type the short form of that Business unit , and they expect results with the business unit which they have searched. Thesaurus can be a help here, just import a file (csv) to the Enterprise Search with the Business unit name (short Form) and the complete form, so that Search engine can look for the complete name even though the short form was searched. Another situation can be change of organization name. Lets say , an organization which was called VBU (Vertical Business Unit) is renamed as BVO (Business Vertical Organization), with the fact that all the old document must be referring VBU , when a user /employee search for BVO, he should get results from VBU too. Again Thesaurus will handle this.

How can we do this:

Create a file with extension csv, and have three headers

Key,Synonym,Language

Start adding the keys and synonyms.For above scenarios, it will be

 Key,Synonym,Language
 VBU,Vertical Business Unit, en
 VBU, BVO,en
 BVO, Business Vertical Organization,en
 SP, SharePoint,en
 SP2013, SharePoint 2013, en
 admin, administrator,en

For this Demo, In my Hyper -V , I have had few documents and I searched for "SP" , and I got 4 results as shown. While Searching for SP, I expected results for SharePoint as an user.

Now We import the csv file with Thesaurus to search service application, and now this dictionary is added for the content processing engine to be able to provide us some relevant results.

We run following powerShell Scripts

 Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell"
 #Get service application
 $mySearchServApp = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
 #import the thesaurus file with data.
 Import-SPEnterpriseSearchThesaurus -SearchApplication $mySearchServApp -FileName \\sp15\SearchRel\Thesaurus\Sample.csv

Please Note: File Name is in form of UNC path.

It should complete with success message as shown below.

And Now We search for same "SP", and we have results which I was expecting.

 You do not even need a crawl before you can start seeing the effect of added synonyms. Thesaurus are powerful and easy to implement and can make a hugh improvement in user experience.

Cont...

Step 1: Setting Up Trust across Farms

To enable federated search across two versions of SharePoint Search (SP2010 and Sp2013) , first, there should be trust enabled between both the farms (SP2010 and SP2013). We will refer SP2010 as Consuming Farm and SP2013 as Publishing Farm or provider farm.

An administrator of the consuming farm must provide two trust certificates to the administrator of the publishing farm a root certificate and a security token service (STS) certificate. Additionally, an administrator of the publishing farm must provide a root certificate to the administrator of the consuming farm. By exchanging certificates, each farm acknowledges that the other farm can be trusted.

Run the following script on the Consuming farm (SP2010) by an administrator to export the SharePoint Root and STS certificates.

Then Run the below script to export the SharePoint Root certificate on Publishing Farm (SP2013).

Import the consuming farm (SP2010) certificates on publishing farm (SP2013) using the following scripts

And Finally Import the Publishing farm certificate to consuming farm

Step 2: Setup Search and Publishing

 Once the trust is setup, The Search service application needs to be created and published for other farm to be able to consume it. it is recommend that search should be built using the PowerShell.

Do publishing of the search service application from the Central Administration portal.

After the Search is provisioned, Navigate to CA, and look for Search service application. Select the service application and click on the Publish button in the ribbon.On the popped out page, Select the checkbox “publish this service for other farms” and copy the URN after scrolling down the page for later use in consuming farm. Finally Click “Ok” to save the changes

Step 3: Permissions

This step is not required on Single Server farm setup. For Load, balanced environment following setup is required to allow service application to have appropriate permissions. This was not part of the POC. Hence, the steps are excluded from this document.

 Please follow below TechNet article in case; this is required in future setups.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff700211(v=office.15).aspx

Step 4: Connect to the Published service application

After the publishing farm has published the service application, an administrator of the consuming farm can connect to that service application from the consuming farm by using the URL of the published service application. From the consuming Farm, Navigate to Manage Service application page in central Administrator (CA >> Application Management >> Manage service Applications)

Select in ribbon, Connect >> Search service proxy.

In the text box, enter the URL of the published service application URL. Click Ok, and the service application from the published farm will appear. Select the Search Service application. Click Ok to create the service proxy for Search from the publishing Farm.

Step 5: Associate Service application with the Web Application

The web application, which should be crawled from the publishing farm, requires being associated with this service application proxy. Make sure the proxy is added to web application from CA >>Application Management >>Service applications >> Configure Service application Associations.

Step 6: Configure Server-to-Server authentication between farms

To enable a web application or an application service to request a resource from a web application on another farm on behalf of a user, you must configure server-to-server authentication between the farms. 

The scripts needs to be run to enable S2S.

Step 7: Configure Content Source

This is final stage where content source is configured on publishing farm. Make sure that the content crawling account has “Full Read” permissions on the Web application running in consumer farm. 

From the Publishing farm, Navigate to Search service application. Click on Content source and add the web application URL for the crawling. After the Full crawl, the content can be searched from Consuming farm.

First Thing, That stroke me was , the Install account should have access on this file Share.  I added that. Now, I can access them on the Windows explorer. Re-ran the wizard, still File Share Validation failed.

Closer look onto the error message , will help you understand the issue. As it was the Availability group which was trying to restore the DBs onto the file share, SQL account required access to read/write onto that shared folder.  As we granted the access, Validation completed with Success, and the wizard.

Happy Learning!

1. Using Thesaurus (Synonyms)
2. Entity Extractor
3. Query Rules
4. Spelling Corrections
5. Authoritative Pages
6. Query Suggestions
7. Building Verticals

now how can you get going with it.

First Thumb rule, do not try this on your Primary System. Windows team is still working on several things. It’s just a preview (TEASER) for all. So, First thing to do is to navigate to Windows Insider portal, and Join the program by clicking Join button.  And you are registered as Insider.

Click on the Install Technical Preview link from the welcome page and you will navigate to another page where you have download links. it has links for minimum hardware requirements.along with that it has  the Product Key for this windows 10 . Keep the code handy to be used.

I used my Azure subscription to quickly provision a windows 8.1 Virtual Machine on Azure IAAS. Quite simple and easy. If you are not sure how to setup that, please read this.

Now from the download links, I started downloading the binaries for windows 10.Wait for 5-10 minutes and you are all set to upgrade your machine (in my case a virtual Windows 8.1 installation) to Windows 10.

Once download has completed, Mount the downloaded iso file and run the setup.exe file with admin rights.

Accept the terms and condition after reading it and accept to start the update. After a while, you should another prompt to retain your files or start from scratch .

I wanted to keep my file so proceeded with default option. And after a while, the upgrade starts

ENJOY and EXPLORE

It is integrated with Azure portal and available for provisioning under Data Storage, Cache and Back Up section. Also, it will be available from quick menu as shown below.

The Azure Search works on its ​API  and should be used by developers to utilize the search service to create indexes, upload files for the indexing and finally make it available as a search result.  Azure Search will take out the burden of setting up search service infrastructure and repetitive labor and cost of managing these services. Also, It is really easy to scale out this as shown below.

As of now, Its the developer community who can leverage on this and can build solutions which are really dependent of high performing search service. I found a really nice article explaining creation of Indexes and finally searching it from Azure Search.

Please refer this 

In Nut Shell,

Azure Search is a indexing service which will allow a provisioned​ service which is capable to delivering high query per second(50-60) and can be scalable further if further needed.