Probably the greatest out-of-the-box offering from the SharePoint product is search. However, the U.I. for search within SharePoint sites leaves a bit to be desired. The various site templates place the search box in areas on the page, I felt, weren’t prominent enough. Plus, I wanted to offer things like suggestions when searching for people and tracking/trending search topics.

Based on my research in user behavior, I knew that having a robust search U.I. would be vital in providing a successful Intranet site using SharePoint.

So, I set out to create a fully-functional user control to enhance the experience for our users. This is the first in a series of posts that will cover how it all got implemented.

Creating the User Control

I felt like search should be a tool that is readily available throughout the entire Intranet experience. I decided to create one user control that could be placed on the master page of the Intranet site. All the code would be developed into the user control and data would be provided by a web service.

1. Open Visual Studio and create a new Web Site Project
2. Add a new user control to the project
3. Add References to Microsoft.SharePoint and System.DirectoryServices (The Microsoft.SharePoint.dll can be located on your front-end web server if you develop on a separate workstation)
4. You may create a masterpage and attach it to the Default.aspx in your project. Then you can add the user control to the Default.aspx page. This will create an environment similar to your SharePoint site.

Now we have an environment similar to our SharePoint site. We can build design elements on our user control and bring them into our SharePoint site experience.

That’s great. But how do I get the user control working across my entire SharePoint site?

Because the search is so fundamental in our design, I wanted to add the user control to the master page of the SharePoint site. This would make the search experience prominent within the site (think Google or Yahoo).

1. Create a folder called “usercontrols” so that you can put the user control design (.ascx) file in a location the SharePoint site can find. (\\\C$\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\usercontrols)
2. In the usercontols folder, place your .ascx file (after you build the project of course)
3. In the bin file of your site (\\$\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\sharepointsite.domain.com80\bin) copy the compiled .dll from your project.
4. Open up SharePoint Designer and navigate to your master page (in my case I’m using “_catalogs\masterpage\default.master”)
5. Register the user control on the master page: <%@ Register src="~/_controltemplates/usercontrols/.ascx” tagname=”” tagprefix=”uc1″ %>

Of course, for this to work we need to mark certain assemblies as “safe” in the web.config of our site if they have not been deployed to the GAC. For instance, if you are using a ScriptManager you may want to add

<SafeControl Assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" Namespace="System.Web.UI" TypeName="*" Safe="True" AllowRemoteDesigner="True" />

to your web.config under “SafeControls”. Depending on any other assemblies (Telerik, Dundas, etc.) you may need to add those as well. There is plenty of information in Googleland to handle those types of questions.

You may also want to take a look at my post about controlling the styling of your master page. This will help you in getting your user control placed and designed exactly how you want it.

Next Part: SharePoint Search on Steroids Part 2 — Using JQuery and Web Services