There is mostly a requirement to roll up the content across web application or farms. Following the approach that I used to syndicate a news item stored in a list in one of the web application across the farm. Also, discussed below are some of the alternative options that can be used.

The objective for this approach is to apply minimum custom efforts.

Overview 

News syndication is achieved by having a Publisher-Subscriber model where Publisher contains a List where the news items are added. Subscriber uses an OOB Webpart named “Core Search Results” webpart with few customizations to enable subscriber to display syndicated news and apply some filter to it.

We are using of FAST Search Service Application (Fast Content and Fast Query) to enable news syndication across different web applications.

Publisher

A List is to be provisioned at Publisher site with the following columns:

News List

Column Name	Description
Title	Title for the news item
Description	Details of the news. Implemented as Rich Text to enable hyperlinks and other formatting can be incorporated
News Image	The image associated with the news item. Implemented as Url field which point to a “Picture” type
Created On	The date time for when the news item is been created.

Subscriber

A custom web part is created titled “Syndicated News” which extends the functionality of OOB web part “Core Search Results” web part.

Following are the properties it extends:

Property Name	Description
ListPath	Defines the path for the list from which news items are searched. It refers to the publisher’s news list.
Interval	Indicates the day’s interval to filter the news items.

It also presets some of the base class properties by overriding CreateChildControls method. The logic is as follows:

Assembly Name	NewsWebpart
Class Name	SyndicatedNewsWebPart
Base Class	CoreResultsWebPart
Overridden Method	CreateChildControls
Logic	// Setting up the properties to customize the display this.ShowActionLinks = false; this.bForceOnInit = false; if (this.ListPath != string.Empty && this.Interval != 0) { DateTime previousDate = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1 * this.Interval); string query = string.Format("path:'{0}' & isListItem:true & write>={1}", this.ListPath, previousDate.ToShortDateString()); this.FixedQuery = query; } string styleBaseUrl = SPContext.Current.Site.RootWeb.Url; // Expecting XSL to be existing within the routed library. this.XslLink = string.Format("{0}/Style Library/XSL Style Sheet/NewsStyle.xsl", styleBaseUrl); base.CreateChildControls();

As indicated by above code, webpart also uses the custom XSL Stylesheet in order to display the news items in a specific format that includes the image thumbnails of the news item. This XSL file resides in the root web of the web application at following path:

<RootWeb>/Style Library/XSL Style Sheet/NewsStyle.xsl

Deployment Constraints

Both the xsl stylesheet and custom webpart is deployed using a feature scoped at Site Collection Level. For a web part to show content as specified for News Item, the style sheet is required to be placed in existing Style Library.

Dependencies

FAST Search Considerations

In order for displaying News Item we are required to crawl the list content (news item) from the Publisher using FAST Search Service Application (FAST Content) in a specified frequency (daily or hourly). Hence, in order to maintain the frequency of crawling we have a separate Content Source “News Crawl” scoped at Site Level where the News List resides. Following are the design aspects that are needed:

News Crawl Content Source

Property Name	Value
Name	News Crawl
Start Addresses	The URL of the site where the News List exists
Content Source Type	SharePoint Sites
Crawl Settings	Check “Crawl everything under the hostname for each start address”
Full Crawl	Weekly or blank (as it is required only once)
Incremental Crawl	Set the frequency daily or hourly.

After the first Full Crawl the news content will be available for syndication.

Also, in order to display the Image (New Image column) of the Source list, the crawled property “owsnewsimage” is required to be mapped to “PictureThumbnailUrl” managed property. This is accomplished by mapping the crawled property to Managed property from FAST Query Service Application after successful full crawl is done.

The mapping of crawled property to managed property is done under FAST Search Administration page with in FAST Query Service Application.

Alternative Approaches

Following are the alternative approaches which can be considered in order to provide Item Syndication across web application and farm.

CrossListQueryInfo

The CrossListQueryInfo can be used to query a list across web application. Caching can used along with the query in order to provide the optimum performance. More details can be taken from this URL https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/bhushangawale/cross-web-application-query-sharepoint/

This approach is workable but it requires same App pool account across all web application or the app account of the source should be added as an dbowner for the content database for all web application.

Federated Search Core Result Webpart with List RSS Feed

The Source list can be exposed as RSS feeds and Federated Content Source can be created in FAST Search Content Source can be added to query the RSS Feeds. (This requires setting any kind of authentication requirements within content source.)

A Federated Search Core Result Webpart can then be used to query the source and display result along with XSL transformation as done above.

The benefit of using this approach is that a runtime result is displayed to the user, and it doesn’t depend upon crawl frequency as in the chosen approach. Alternatively, the performance of the page load is been compromised here.

More details can be obtained from the following link

https://www.sharepointanalysthq.com/2010/06/creating-an-rss-reader-using-a-federated-search-web-part/

Custom Webpart with FAST Query Language

Above chosen approach can be extended by developing a custom webpart that make an FQL (Fast Query Language) to Source List and returns the dataset. This dataset can be used to provide user a post approval processing before displaying the content using CQWP webpart.

Content Deployment Feature

In order to provide extensive solution for approval process post receiving the syndicated items, also if syndication are required to happen across farm, this option can be explored.

More details can be obtained from this link https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721058.aspx

Most of the organizations structure there departments or Business Units into separate site collections. For example all sites related to Human Resource, Finance, Management, Operations etc are grouped into separate site collection under one/multiple farms. Hence, there can be a requirement within search that the search results can be refined based on the department/business unit (site collections) name they are coming from.

Introduction

There is a requirement to enable user to have Business Units (Departments) as a search refiner in the refinement panel for any search made through the search page. The search is done across the farm and there is no metadata stored along with the searched content (list item as a column or document as a document property) to indicate in the refinement panel. This metadata is incorporated using XSL that transform the refinement xml into the refinement panel.

Here we have modified Search Refinement Webpart to get the intended result. Any Search Service can be used in this context.

Two different xml is been modified to get the intended result, which are as follows:

Filter Category Definition

A new category is required to be added to the category xml to the Refinement Panel WebPart. This is our custom category to indicate business unit. Also, ensure to uncheck Use Default Configuration option to enable our custom category to be displayed in refinement panel.

Refinement Panel

<Category 
      Title="Department"
      Description="Which department this document is from"
      Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search
            .WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator"
      MetadataThreshold="1"
      NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="4" 
      MaxNumberOfFilters="20"
      ShowMoreLink="True"
      MappedProperty="sitename"
      MoreLinkText="show more" 
      LessLinkText="show fewer"
      ShowCounts="Count" 
/>

RefinerStyle.xsl

As indicated by above code, webpart also uses the custom XSL Stylesheet in order to display the custom refinement in a specific format that includes the department name along with the number of instance found. This XSL file resides in the root web of the web application at following path:

<RootWeb>/Style Library/XSL Style Sheet/RefinerStyle.xsl

The above URL is added to XSL Link property of the web part.

XSL Constraint

In order to map the search content to either of the Business Unit, we use the OOB refined managed property sitename which refines based on URL of the search content rolled up to Site Collection.

It is advised to make a copy of OOB XSL file and then make changes to it.

Within XSL we add a condition within <xsl:choose> element of Categories template, in order to provide special handling of the “Department” category.

Categories Template

<xsl:when test="$ManagedProperty = 'sitename' and $DisplayName = 'Department'">
   <xsl:call-template name="Filter2">
    <xsl:with-param name="Filters" select="Filters/Filter" />
    <xsl:with-param name="ShowCounts" select="$ShowCounts" />
   </xsl:call-template>
</xsl:when>

After, that it only left at Filter template to modify incoming URL value to our custom values. For better implementation a copy of Filter Template is created with name Filter2 which is specific for our custom refinement category

<xsl:template name="FilterLink2"> 
    <xsl:param name="Url"/> 
    <xsl:param name="UrlTooltip"/> 
    <xsl:param name="Value"/> 
    <xsl:param name="FilterSelection"/> 
    <xsl:param name="ShowCounts"/> 
    <xsl:param name="Count"/> 
    <xsl:param name="Percentage"/> 
    <xsl:param name="Indentation"/> 
    <xsl:variable name="OriginalUrl" select="$Url"> 
    </xsl:variable> 
    <xsl:variable name="SecureUrl"> 
        <xsl:call-template name="GetSecureUrl"> 
             <xsl:with-param name="Url" select="$Url" /> 
        </xsl:call-template> 
    </xsl:variable> 
    <li class="ms-searchref-filter {$FilterSelection}"> 
        <xsl:if test="($Indentation = '1')"> 
            <span class="ms-searchref-indenticon">&#8627;&#160;</span> 
        </xsl:if> 
        <a class="ms-searchref-filterlink" href="{$SecureUrl}" 
           title="{$RefineByHeading}: {$UrlTooltip}"> 
            <xsl:choose> 
               <xsl:when test="contains($Value, '<url like demo2010a:33393>')"> 
                  <xsl:value-of select="'Human Resource'"/> 
               </xsl:when> 
               <xsl:when test="contains($Value, '<url like demo2010a:19295>')"> 
                  <xsl:value-of select="'Finance'"/> 
               </xsl:when> 
               <xsl:otherwise> 
                  <xsl:value-of select="Value"/> 
               </xsl:otherwise> 
            </xsl:choose> 
         </a> 
         <xsl:choose> 
            <xsl:when test="($ShowCounts = 'Count') and ($Count != '')"> 
               <span class="ms-searchref-count"> 
                  <xsl:if test="$IsRTL = 'True'">&#x200f;</xsl:if> 
                    (<xsl:value-of select="Count"/>) 
               </span> 
            </xsl:when> 
            <xsl:when test="($ShowCounts = 'Percentage') and ($Percentage != '')"> 
               <span class="ms-searchref-count"> 
                   <xsl:if test="$IsRTL = 'True'">&#x200f;</xsl:if> 
                    (<xsl:value-of select="format-number($Percentage, '0%')"/>) 
               </span> 
            </xsl:when> 
         </xsl:choose> 
    </li> 
</xsl:template> 

<xsl:template name="Filter2"> 
    <xsl:param name="Filters" /> 
    <xsl:param name="ShowCounts" /> 
    <xsl:for-each select="$Filters"> 
    <xsl:variable name="Selection" select="Selection" /> 
    <xsl:choose> 
       <xsl:when test="($Selection = 'Selected')"> 
          <xsl:call-template name="FilterLink2"> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Url" select="Url" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="UrlTooltip" select="Tooltip" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Value" select="Value" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="FilterSelection" 
                select="'ms-searchref-selected ms-searchref-removable'"/> 
               <xsl:with-param name="ShowCounts" select="$ShowCounts" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Count" select="Count" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Percentage" select="Percentage" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Indentation" select="Indentation" /> 
          </xsl:call-template> 
        </xsl:when> 
        <xsl:when test="($Selection = 'Implied')"> 
          <xsl:call-template name="FilterLink2"> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Url" select="Url" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="UrlTooltip" select="Tooltip" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Value" select="Value" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="FilterSelection" 
                select="'ms-searchref-selected'" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="ShowCounts" select="$ShowCounts" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Count" select="Count" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Percentage" select="Percentage" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Indentation" select="Indentation" /> 
           </xsl:call-template> 
         </xsl:when> 
         <xsl:otherwise> 
           <xsl:call-template name="FilterLink2"> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Url" select="Url" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="UrlTooltip" select="Tooltip" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Value" select="Value" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="FilterSelection"
                select="'ms-searchref-unselected'" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="ShowCounts" select="$ShowCounts" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Count" select="Count" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Percentage" select="Percentage" /> 
               <xsl:with-param name="Indentation" select="Indentation" /> 
           </xsl:call-template> 
         </xsl:otherwise> 
     </xsl:choose> 
  </xsl:for-each> 
</xsl:template>

Post Consideration

Since the mapping or the metadata about the department of the searched content resides within the xsl file. Any modification is required to be done on every instance of such xsl files (across the farm). The better approach here can be making a web service call (using JavaScript) to the centralized location where a mapping table can be maintained.

After searching few blogs and forum, I figured out the way to configure our msdn blogs
[eg: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/nkhare] with Live writer after few glitches.

So the steps goes as follows:

1. Create an MSDN Blog.
2. Open the blog site and login with the configured window live ID
3. Click on Settings and then Change Password link under Sign In Information Heading.
4. On the Change Password page click on click here to recover it link

5. Mention your Microsoft email address and click Recover Password.

6. After you receive your mail from noreply@blogs.msdn.com  click on create a new password online link.

7. Create a new password. Remember this is not the password for your live account. But, it will be required while configuring Live Writer.

8. Now, as your new password is created you can start configuring to live writer. Open live writer, click on Add Blog account link. If you are opening live writer for first time, the dialog automatically appears.

Select Other Services and click Next.

9. Enter the blog address, Username (as appears on the top left corner of the blog site. Note, it should not be the mail address live account or Microsoft ID.), Password (as created by Step 7).

10. Click Next and you are done.  

Note: These are the steps which I followed to configure live writer with msdn blog. This may or may not be fully helpful to you.

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