How To: Create a Mobile Search Center for MOSS
Hi,
One of the many cool things in MOSS is probably the "M" feature – a way to view some of MOSS's contents with a mobile device (just add "\m" to the requested path and you'll see a Mobile-Targeted page). Not too long ago, I had a customer that wanted to use this feature to enable Mobile Searching and that's how I discovered the unfortunate true - the "M" feature was nowhere to be found when you're talking about Search. Pretty wired, isn't it? Come to think of it - Search in one of the few things I would do with my Mobile (apart from E-mails and Youtube of course). So, how come it's not in the product?
Well – the good news is that this is actually very simple to create a Mobile Search Center (should take you half an hour or so). Here are the steps that will guide you in your honorable quest for the illustrious Mobile Search:
- Create a new search center site called MobileSearch with a URL of 'ms' (go to home and choose Site actions à Create Site and pick the search center template) (you can hide it from normal navigation if you want to later)
- Then tweak the web parts on the default.aspx search page by aligning the web parts vertically so there's no horizontal scrolling (move the search box to the lower-left). You can also make the web part a fixed width, etc – check out the various web part settings. It is also recommended to hide the advanced link.
- Then tweak the results page by aligning the web parts vertically in the top left zone à move best bets and paging far left above results, delete some of the parts you don't need (statistics, search action links, the lower paging part, etc) and limit the results web part to 3 results and 1 sentence. You can even limit all of the web parts to a width of x pixels or y inches to exactly accommodate the mobile device (if you can define the targeting device – you can also create Mobile Search Centers for each device and fit the page exactly to the screen size).
- Create a minimal master page (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa660698.aspx) to remove all of the extra headers, etc that can't show up on a phone (not enough space). Make sure you check-in the page and approve it.
- Apply that minimal master page to the site under site settings
- Use SharePoint Designer to tweak the spacing on the results.aspx page. Remove unnecessary whitespace on the page and to ensure no horizontal scrolling.
That's it! Fairly easy, don't you think?
Adir Ron.