enterprise search from microsoft

1.

FOCUS ON SHAREPOINTTHIERRY JANSSENS – 8/12/2011

Microsoft Search offering

2.

Questions often asked …

What Search products does Microsoft offer?

What are the major differences for End-users?

What are the differences for IT Professionals?

Are there any differences for Developers?

Why don’t people use Search on our Intranet?

The results are poor and not clear, what are my options?

Why bother organizing my documents if I have “FAST”?

Does FAST have all the functionalities as Sharepoint Search?

What are the typical costs for both products?

What else can search do for me?

Are there other search products from Microsoft that could help me?

What about the future of the Microsoft search offering?

3.

Search products for Sharepoint

Sharepoint Foundation 2010

Sharepoint Server 2010

FAST Search Server for Sharepoint

Search Server 2010 Express

Search Server 2010

30/11/2011

?

4.

Search Server 2010 (Express?)

5.

FAST?

Formerly FAST ESP

Norwegian

Since 1997

Bought by MS in 2008

Summer 2011, only Sharepoint FAST

www.fastsearch.com

6.

FAST: What does it look like?

FAST/Sharepoint result page:Ø RefinersØ ResultsØ View in browserØ Thumbnail preview

Demo

7.

Major differences for end-users

Federated results

Metadata based refiners

Query Suggestions, Did You Mean & Related Searches

People search

View in Browser

Same capabilities, plus:

Thumbnails & Previews

Visual Best Bets

Deep refiners with counts

Sorting on any property

Better language support

Richer query language

© based on SPConference Richman

8.

And for IT Professionals?

Enterprise Scale-out

Full Fault Tolerance

PowerShell support

SCOM support

Full search reporting

Same capabilities, plus:

Extreme scale-out

Content Processing pipeline

Tunable relevance ranking

OOB JDBC connector

© based on SPConference Richman

9.

Major differences for developers

Public web parts

New connector framework

Integrated with BCS

Tooling in VS2010

Same capabilities, plus:

Extend content processing

Include ext. data in relevance

Use advanced queries (FQL)

© based on SPConference Richman

10.

Pitfalls with FAST

FAST doesn’t have…Ø AlertingØ Refinement & relevance on social tagsØ Index mirroring across data centersØ OOB monitoring (FAST requires SCOM)

Points of attentionØ FAST requires quite some infrastructureØ No upgrade path from ESP to FS4SPØ Configuring FAST is not straightforwardØ It is a strange environment for .net people

11.

Why don’t people use search on our Intranet?

Most vendors have decent search engines

There’s no search engine that can read users’ minds

Were stakeholders interviewed?

Was the engine monitored and adjusted on an ongoing basis?

Was there a POC and phased implementation?

Add other sources: File servers, business data, other websites

Use taxonomies, tagging, promote properties as facets

Exclude no longer relevant data (archive)

Configure best bets, visual clues, synonyms,…

Scope on certain content types

12.

Tuning the results

Why bother organizing my documents if I have “FAST”?

Metadata is “key” for search engines

But … then I need to tag all info ???

… with FAST you can interfere much more through the pipeline model

Demo

13.

Hardware Licenses

Configuration Search Team

What are the typical costs?

• 3 for FAST • 2 for SPSearch• Disksize

• Install & Config• Customizing results• Reindex!

• Servers• CALs

• Standard• Enterprise

• Measure • Tune• End-user follow-up

14.

What else can search do for me?

Provide a navigation

Facilitate document roll-up

Reporting or overviews

Who-is-who

15.

Other search “things” ?

Desktop Search

SQL 2008 iFTS

Exchange 2010

LookingGlass

BING

OpenSearch

16.

What about the future?

Probably on the BI side of search

Search Based Applications

Visualization of results

What we (Sharepoint) hope for…Ø Better integration between SP / FAST

Where is FAST Home?Search Business Center?

Ø Converge to one product?Should be for the Sharepoint ecosystemOther technologies require other engines

17.

If Search is important for your company, than treat it that way

Tune, measure, repeat