Making Search & Preview Available

To make the features of Search & Preview available to users, your site must provide the following:
• An Search & Preview Search Center, which supplies pages that interact with the SharePoint search database by submitting queries and displaying search results. The Search Center is a standard SharePoint sub-site, which usually contains several different pages for providing features such as: a simple search form, an advanced search form, several result pages, each optimized to display a specific type of result (such as images, people, documents, etc.). Each search and result page in the Search Center is populated with Search & Preview Web Parts, which are responsible for creating the various features. See also “The Search & Preview Search Center” for more information about the Search Center.

• An Search & Preview Search Box, which is available on all pages of your site. The Search Box is very simple, usually just a single input field, though it may also have a scope selector and a few links (e.g., to an advanced search page). The Search Box must be configured to target an appropriate result page in the Search Center. The Search Box is a standard Web control; in a typical SharePoint installation, Search & Preview will automatically replace the standard SharePoint search box with the Search & Preview one (unless you have customized your site template so that it no longer includes the delegate control normally used with SharePoint). See also “Using the Search & Preview Search Box” for more information about the Search Box.

To make Search & Preview Available to users:

1. Install and activate Search & Preview for the farm.
This makes Search & Preview software available at the farm level. See “Running the Search & Preview Setup Program” and “Activating and Deactivating Farm-Level Features” for instructions.

2. Deploy Search & Preview for each application.
This might have already been done automatically during installation, but if you add a new application or if you chose not to deploy automatically, then you may need to do so manually. See “Manual Deployment” for instructions.

3. Activate Search & Preview for each relevant site collection.
This will result in all of the Search & Preview Web Parts, Web Controls, galleries and templates to be available to the site collection. See “Activating and Deactivating Search & Preview for a Selected Collection” for instructions.

4. Add the Search & Preview Search Box Web Control wherever needed in your page templates.
This should only be necessary if you have removed (or renamed) the standard Microsoft SharePoint search-box delegate control (otherwise, Search & Preview automatically becomes the standard Search Box for all sites where Search & Preview is activated). See “Adding an Search & Preview Search Box to Your Site” for more information about adding the Search Box.

5. Create a Search Center for each relevant site collection.
Search & Preview provides a site template that enables you to create a new Search Center at any time using the standard SharePoint controls for adding sites to your solution. Note that you should create the Search Center at the URL targeted by the Search Box (default is “Search & PreviewSearch”). See “Creating an Search & Preview Search Center” for more information.

6. If you are using the SharePoint “My Sites” feature, then activate and set up the Search & Preview Search Box for the web application that hosts the personal sites.
Because each of the personal sites created for the “My Sites” feature is actually its own site collection (of which there can be many), you should manage the Search Box for all of these at once by working at the application level, rather than activating and configuring Search & Preview individually for each personal site collection. See “Using the Search Box with ‘My Sites’” for details.