How to do when you do not find your documents or workspaces using search?

If MetaShare does not show all documents or workspaces when using the search based pages in MetaShare’s start page (the “Search for documents” tab or the “Workspaces” tab), or if you get error-messages in the result-lists, you can do the following tests to see where the issue lies:

Search for documents in standard SharePoint search

If the issue that you are experiencing is that a document is not being shown in the the “Search for documents” tab, then do the following:

  1. Search for some documents in the “Search for documents” tab:
    Search for some documents in MetaShare
  2. Click on the “Show results in SharePoint” link, beneath the search box (marked in yellow above). The same query will now be performed in SharePoint’s standard search and shown in a new browser tab:
    Search results in SharePoint
  3. If the missing documents are shown in SharePoint’s search results, then the issue is probably related to MetaShare and you should therefore open a support case with MetaShare support.
  4. If the results are the same in MetaShare’s search as in SharePoint’s search and the results are not correct, then the issue could be that SharePoint’s search index is not updated. You can test and see if a reindex of the site where the missing documents are located helps. You will have to wait for at least 15 minutes before the documents get reindexed and if the site has many documents, the reindexing could take several hours.
  5. If a reindex still does not help, then there’s most probably an issue with SharePoint’s search engine and you will have to open a support ticket with Microsoft (MetaShare support can assist with this as well, if needed).

Search for workspaces in standard SharePoint search

If the issue that you are experiencing is that a workspace is not being shown in the the “Workspaces” tab, then do the following:

  1. Search for the site/workspace in MetaShare’s “Search for documents” tab (according to the instructions above).
  2. Once SharePoint’s search results page is shown in a new browser tab, switch between the “Files” and the “Sites” verticals (highlighted in yellow below):
    Switching to the sites vertical
  3. If the workspace that you did not find in MetaShare’s search is now shown in SharePoint’s search, try to add the following to the search query:
    MetaShareWorkspaceOWSTEXT=Active

    This is to see if the workspace has received workspace metadata during the provisioning of the workspace’s SharePoint site. If the workspace is not shown, then contact MetaShare support.