Recently in a project, where we are implementing Microsoft Teams, we faced an issue in the SharePoint Modern Sites created with Microsoft Teams where site columns were not showing up in managed properties even after a 24 hour wait. Pretty sure the crawled property must have been crawled, we started investigating the issue with MS help and found a workaround fix.
In this blog, will list out the troubleshooting steps and quick fix for the search properties for those having a similar issue
Issue:
The crawled property and manged property for the Site column don’t show up in Search crawled properties of SharePoint Modern Team sites created through Microsoft Teams. The content is actually crawled and the properties exists but doesn’t show up in the Crawled property screen at Site Setting -> Schema or SharePoint Admin Center -> Manage Search Schema.
Troubleshooting:
It is recommended to do the following troubleshooting steps to confirm the fix will work.
Note: If all the steps below are completed, then the data is crawled and there is not other Search crawling issue so the fix will most probably work
1. Reindex site where site column is added. This will add the property in next crawl. The settings are in SiteSettings -> Search and Offline Avaliability
2. Go to searchable columns and make sure the site column hasn’t excluded the site column from searching. The link format is
https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<sitecollec>/_layouts/15/NoCrawlSettings.aspx
3. Look through crawl log using PnP PowerShell to make sure the data is crawled. The script is below and uses PnP PowerShell. For an overview of how get started with PnP PowerShell check here.
Get-PnPSearchCrawlLog -Sites -ContentSource Sites -Filter "https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<sitecollec>"
4. Look through the Crawled and Managed Property XML from the site and see the crawled property is in the xml results. The format of crawl property is ows_<siteColumn> and the REST URL to get the search xml is below
https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<sitecollec>/_api/search/query?querytext=%27<Keyword>%27&trimduplicates=false&selectproperties=%27Path,Title,MyColOWSTEXT%27&refiners=%27ManagedProperties,CrawledProperties%27
5. Use Search of the site to search for explicitly using the managed property format. The format for the managed property is <SiteColumn>OWSCHS. If you get the results as in then the managed property is ready.
Searchquery format: <SiteColumn>OWSCHS:<Search Keyword>
The above steps will helps us identify the site column is crawled and ready for search.
Fix:
The workaround fix for this issue is to add the account that will manage the crawled property as Site Collection Admininstrator of the site. In other words, even if the user who is trying to work on the crawl property is part of the unified group, that user also needs to be explictly added to the Site Collection administrators as in the screenshot below. After adding the user, the property doesn’t show up instantly so leave the user for sometime and in few hours the crawl property should show up automatically by magic 🙂
Conclusion
In this blog, we saw how we could get the crawled properties to show up in Search Schema for SharePoint Team sites created through Teams. Actually as of 5th Nov 2018, MS has identified this issue and will be releasing a fix soon, so if it doesn’t happen after some time then you know 🙂