hi all

Good morning. I hope someone can direct me in the right path.

Server Setup 1 - SharePoint 2013 (using as search engine - fileserver)

SharePoint 2013 Foundation - Latest Patches with HTTP

Windows Server 2012

Server Setup 2 - Office Web Apps 2013

Office Web Apps - Latest Patches with HTTP

Windows Server 2012

Issues that I am facing - Search preview

a. I have configure SP2013 as a search for my file server. I get all the searches but I cannot preview them. I have configured the Office Web Apps 2013 and can successfully see the XML file in various TechNet article's. No event errors.  I have ran various PowerShell commands, to see if SP connects with Office Web Apps and it connects. This is all Internal network and so I have used HTTP.

Issues that I am facing - Open Search Result

b. I have faced this when search a document, I tried to click on OPEN and nothing happens. The document doesn't open and no errors. However, if I send the document to a user, the path opens it directly.

Issues that I am facing - Authentication

c. I would like to provide our users the opportunity to search without entering username and password on a domain computer but required on a non-domain joined computers. Can this be done?

Issues that I am facing - Security Trimming - File Share

d. I have a file share with Access Based Enumeration enabled. Some users are given access and some others no access to view certain folders and files. Will this reflect the searches ?. I have set a READ-ONLY access account to the complete fileShare. Does the searches appear to those who have access and doesn't appear to those who don't have.

I am willing to learn and so I ask some guidance where I have gone wrong with the setup.

Thanks in advance for all the help.

Cheers

Jo

Hi Jo,

#1. Per my knowledge, the files in file share cannot be previewed with Office Web Apps in SharePoint search results.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/fdc18024-1782-4acd-a498-70c53c1d2f64/office-web-apps-preview-of-fileshare-documents

If the documents in the site cannot be previewed, I recommend to use command New-SPWOPIBinding to re-create the binding without Action parameter and then do a full crawl tosee how it works.

#2.  Please check the URL of the file in your search results and then copy the URL in the browser to see if the document can be opened.

#3. I recommend to extend the web application to the internet zone and do not grant anonymous permission on the search results page in the internet zone. Then when the user wants to do search, then he will need to sign in to access the search results page.

#4. Yes, if the user has no access to the files, then he will not be able to search the documents in SharePoint and the documents will not appear in search results.

Best regards.

Thanks

#2 will be related to the JS transforms that are performed on the URL when you click on it. If you use fiddler or step through the page actions then you'll see that the link you click on isn't the one you navigate to.

#4 Victoria is correct, however one thing that people don't always realise is that if they can see the files in a folder (but not open them) then they will see them in the search results (but without any information within the documents). I've seen people panic about this in the past but the security search trimming is pretty good and it's almost never the point of failure.

As for #1, you can get file server preview to work, but it introduces a potential security hole as the WAC service user has to be granted read access to the file share, and this user is used to preview the items. You need to set OpenFromUncEnabled on the WAC server to enable this, as well as create a custom display template/hover template to link the URL via WAC.

hi Mikael

thanks for the information. Do you have a working template or code that I could study to implement it. The WAC server you mean is the Office web app server?

Thanks for your help.

Regards

Hi Victoria

Thanks for the feedback. Point 2, the document doesn't open directly, but if I copy the link shortcut and paste it on the IE browser, it opens the document.

Should I be doing something else or maybe I need to do some setup somewhere?

Thanks for your inputs.

Hi Joseph,

Did you customize the search results item display template for the documents?

Please check the display templates for the corresponding result types of the documents and compare the templates with the templates in other site collections.

And please also compare the Item_CommonItem_Body.html template.

More reference about search results template in SharePoint 2013:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/09/04/understand-how-search-results-are-displayed-in-sharepoint-server-2013.aspx

Best regards.

Thanks

WAC is Office Web App server yes. And I don't have any with file server items set up. But should be pretty forward once you get the link to the Office Web App server with the file path as parameter. Don't remember the exact url right now...it's in some old e-mail. Should be possible to find it on a web search as well.

Hi Joseph,

How is everything going?

Is there anything else that I can help?

If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

Best regards.

Thanks