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?
2.
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
3.
10. Pitfalls with FAST
FAST doesn’t have…
Alerting
Refinement & relevance on social tags
Index mirroring across data centers
OOB monitoring (FAST requires SCOM)
Points of attention
FAST requires quite some infrastructure
No upgrade path from ESP to FS4SP
Configuring FAST is not straightforward
It is a strange environment for .net people
10.
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
11.
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
12.
13. What are the typical costs?
• 3 for FAST • Servers
• 2 for SPSearch • CALs
• Standard
• Disksize • Enterprise
Hardware Licenses
• Install & Config • Measure
• Customizing results • Tune
• Reindex! • End-user follow-up
Configuration Search Team
13.
14. What else can search do for me?
Provide a navigation
Facilitate document roll-up
Reporting or overviews
Who-is-who
14.
16. What about the future?
Probably on the BI side of search
Search Based Applications
Visualization of results
What we (Sharepoint) hope for…
Better integration between SP / FAST
Where is FAST Home?
Search Business Center?
Converge to one product?
Should be for the Sharepoint ecosystem
Other technologies require other engines
16.
17. If Search is important for your company, than treat it that way
Tune,
measure,
repeat 17.