As we further evaluate the Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system in Office 365 and SharePoint, observe that the SharePoint Search results are returning the “Name” property of Sales Contracts when running searches. This is not useful because we want to see the Sales Contract Title value (that’s how everybody refers to the contracts by name):
Search is an essential component of any well constructed business management system and/or LOB application in SharePoint, and what Sales needs to see in their SharePoint Search results is the “Sales Contract Title” property. There are ways to get the Sales Contract Title into Search directly, but the requirements are even more advanced than usual because Sales Contract Title is a calculated field. Looking forward, the series will start getting into those more advanced SharePoint Search configuration examples in the next couple of posts, but here, we can get a quick win with a workflow built in SharePoint Designer.
Building the SharePoint Designer Workflow to Set Title:
The premise here is that…Search will output the out-of-the-box “Title” property with higher preference than the “Name” property, but when constructing this part of the system, we specifically hid “Title” from the content type as seen in this post.
With a “one-liner” workflow, we can automate the process of setting “Title” to equal the value of “Sales Contract Title” when an item is created. And, we can also configure the workflow to be start-able manually so we can go back and retrofit this logic on existing Sales Contracts. We’ll see that now, and if you need a reference to launching SharePoint Designer and getting started with workflows, read here .
Running the Workflow in SharePoint Manually and On Create:
That’s all that is needed. So, let’s look at how to update existing contracts by triggering the workflow manually:
Now, to validate that it’s firing automatically when new Sales Contracts are added:
Validating the SharePoint Search Results:
Here’s were you need to be patient…it’s going to take SharePoint Search awhile to crawl all of these documents again and pick-up on the new Title field. But it (i.e. SharePoint Search) will, and when it does the results are obvious. See the SharePoint Search results below, and also take note of the search query as an example of how you can specifically target Sales Contracts. The syntax shown (e.g. with colons and asterisks) is known as Keyword Query Language (KQL). You can read more about that here if you want to super-charge your SharePoint Search abilities.
Now to continue with some more advanced SharePoint Search work in upcoming posts.
Categories: Business, Business Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Office 365 and O365, SharePoint
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