If you tried working with SharePoint FAST Search you will know that ability to target content to a defined category of users is one of the key advatages of using FAST. It’s sort of like Audience targeting in a web part or page. Out-of-the-box you can define many features, such as best bets, to display different information depending on the context of the user. You can define your User Context from Site Actions -> Site Settings -> FAST Search User Context.
Here is what defining new user context looks like:
In here, we basicaly construct our user context based on the profiles availble in User Profile Service Application. Out-of-the-box we have just two properties Office Location and Ask Me About. I don’t know about you, but in my organization a Department would be a better identifier of the target audience. Let’s take a look at how we can enable additional properties to define user context.
1. Navigate to your Central Administration and click on Manage Service Applications
2. Pick User Profile Service Application, this is where all of the user properties are stored.
3. Under People click Manage User Properties
4. Pick the property you would like to use for User Context, in my case it’s Department, click Edit. When the edit page opens, just capture the name of the property; some display names are different than internal property names, it`s important that you get the Name and not the Display name:
5. Now open SharePoint Products PowerShell from the start menu of your server.
6. Execute the following two commands:
$contextProps = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchExtendedQueryProperty -SearchApplication "FASTQuery" -Identity "FASTSearchContextProperties"
Set-SPEnterpriseSearchExtendedQueryProperty -SearchApplication "FASTQuery" -Identity "FASTSearchContextProperties" -Value $contextProps + ",Department"
Here, the first command, gets the list of available properties. Then, we append the list with additional property for the “Department”, which I captured before. Also, note the FASTQuery in my case is the name of the FAST Query Service application, for you it might be some other name.
7. Now, let’s perform an incremental crawl to update the properties on the server. Navigate to your Central Administration and click on Manage Service Applications
8. Pick your FAST Query service application:
9. One the quick launch select Content Sources and start the incemental crawl on the content source to which your site web application subscribes to.
After the crawl has completed, you will have the FAST Search User Context updated with the new property.
Enjoy!
