The document provides an overview of FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010. It discusses how FAST Search was acquired by Microsoft and integrated with SharePoint 2010. It highlights several ways FAST Search is better than SharePoint's native search capabilities, such as better search quality, advanced sorting, and rich web indexing. The document also provides conceptual diagrams of how FAST Search fits into the SharePoint architecture and farm topology.

1. Sponsors SharePoint Saturday
Gold
Technical Overview of FAST
Search Server for
SharePoint 2010
Silver Sezai Komur
SharePoint Solutions Architect
Bronze
CSG

2. What is FAST Search Server for
SharePoint 2010?
• Microsoft buys FAST Search and Transfer in
2008 for $1.2 Billion US.
• Port of FAST ESP integrated with SharePoint
2010.
• New enhanced search engine integrated with
SharePoint Server 2010
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3. How is FAST Search better than
SharePoint Server Search?
• Better search result quality
– Better quality search engine relevancy and use of
linguistics, stemming & lemmatisation in search
processing
• Search Platform Extensibility
• Advanced Content Processing
– Property Extraction
– Document Processing Pipeline Extensibility
• Extreme Scale Search
– Search Billions of documents with sub second search
times
• Deep Refinement
– Exact refinement number, SharePoint refiners aren't over
the entire result set SharePoint Saturday
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4. How is FAST Search better than
SharePoint Server Search?
• Advanced Sorting
– Sort on Managed Properties and Rank Profiles
• Tuneable Relevance with Multiple Rank Profiles
• FQL Query Language
• Contextual Search
– Tailor results and refinement to user profile or audience
• Rich Web Indexing
– Dynamic web content and Javascript, highly customisable connector
• Similar Results Detection & Results Collapsing
• Thumbnails and Previews
– SharePoint 2010 Word and PowerPoint results via Office Web Apps
• Visual Best Bets
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5. FAST Search Service Applications
Two SharePoint Service Applications
Communicate with FAST Servers
• FAST Content Search Service Application
– Connector Configuration
– Crawling
• FAST Query Search Service Application
– Queries and Results from associated Web
Applications
– Managed Property Mapping configuration
– People Search
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6. FAST Web Services
Services that SharePoint communicates with
• Content Distributors
• Query Service
• Administration Service
• Resource Store
• Log Server
• See Install_Info.txt in FAST install folder and
look in IIS
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7. SharePoint Saturday
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8. SharePoint Farm
Web Server Site Collection Admin UI PowerShell Central Administration UI
• Deployment • Schema configuration • Property mapping
Web Parts • User Context Management • Admin configuration • Property extraction
• Promotion/Demotion • Deployment • Spell-checking
configuration
Custom Query Web
front-end Service
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Farm
Federation
Object Model
Administration
FAST Search Content SSA
Query Content
Query (FAST Search
Query Matching Item Connector)
Processing Processing - SharePoint
- BDC
- Exchange Content
External
- Web
federation
People Search
FAST
sources Indexing
(query/crawl)
FAST Search Indexing Connectors
Authorization Web Link
Analysis Content
(FSA)
Query SSA
(Search Service
Monitoring
Application)
User
Profiles Active Microsoft System Center
!
Directory Operations Manager !
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9. Simple Conceptual Architecture
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10. Topology Diagram
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11. Medium Farm
SP2010 Farm FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 Farm
WFE WFE FAST-ADM-1 FAST-ADM-2 FAST-FSTIDX-11 FAST-FSTIDX-12 FAST-FSTIDX-13
Query SSA Query SSA Admin Content Distributor 2 Index (Search) Index (Search) Index (Search)
Content Distributor 1 Indexing Dispatcher 2 4 Docprocs+ 4 Docprocs+ 4 Docprocs+
Indexing Dispatcher 1 Web Analyzer
Web Analyzer 6 Docprocs+
SP2010 Services Farm (Enterprise Crawler)
FAST-FSTIDX-21 FAST-FSTIDX-22 FAST-FSTIDX-23
(Index) Search (Index) Search (Index) Search
SP Crawl SP Crawl QR Server QR Server QR Server
People Crawl People Crawl
Crawl DB Crawl DB
Search Admin DB
SQL 2008 Cluster
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12. SharePoint Saturday
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13. Search Engine Basics
• Crawling
– Gathering content to store in an index
• Indexing
– Storing content in an index optimised for
searching
• Querying
– Users execute searches against the index
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14. Crawling
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15. Crawling
• Connecting to sources of content to
download files and data for processing
• Downloading documents or files (Items)
• Working through URLs
– List or directory of items to crawl
– Following links to other items
• Extracting information from files
– Converting file formats to text for processing
– Identifying properties or fields of information
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16. DEMO
FAST SEARCH SERVICE APPLICATIONS
FAST SYSTEM DIRECTORY
FAST WEB SERVICES
CONNECTORS & CRAWLING
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17. Processing & Indexing
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18. Item Processing
• Format conversion
– IFilters
– Advanced Filter Pack (Oracle Outside In) - 400+ formats
• Language and encoding detection
• Lemmatizer Optional content pipeline
– linguistics normalization stages:
• Tokenizer
– word breaking
• XML Properties mapper
• Entity extraction • Offensive content filter
– companies, locations • Verbatim (whole word)
• DateTimeNormalizer extractor (loads dictionary for
– Date normalization custom extraction, e.g.
• Vectorizer
product names)
– Create document vector for similarity searching • Field Collapsing
• WebAnalyzer • Entity Extraction (persons)
– anchor text and link cardinality analysis • Document Processing Pipeline
• PropertiesMapper Extension
– Map to crawled properties
• PropertiesReporter
– report detected properties
FAST Search stores data to its Search Index after processing completes
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19. Mapper
…
…
Entity
Extraction
Lemmatization
Language
Detection
Format
Conversion
Document Processing Pipeline
Perth 2011
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20. Property Extraction
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21. Document Processing Pipeline
Extensibility
• Items are processed in the Document Processing
Pipeline after they are crawled and before they
are stored in the index.
• Create and alter crawled property data.
• You can run code and pass data to other systems
– ‘Deep’ Search of raw data
– Geocoding
– OCR
– Audio and Video Transcription
… The sky is the limit!
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22. DEMO
DOCUMENT PROCESSING PIPELINE
CRAWLED PROPERTIES
MANAGED PROPERTIES
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23. Search UI
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24. Web Parts
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25. Refiners
• Refinement Panel Web Part
• Add and edit refiners displayed by changing
filter category definition XML.
• Properties specified in lower case, managed
property must have refinement enabled
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26. Rank Profiles
• Configure Multiple Rank Profiles
• Allow Selection of Rank Profile in Search UI
to change sorting
• Defaulting based on user profile
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27. DEMO
SEARCH UI
REFINERS
DOCUMENT PREVIEWS
VISUAL BEST BETS
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28. SP Saturday Slide Template Example
QUESTION AND ANSWER
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29. Related Links
Sezai’s Blog
http://sharepoint-sezai-moss-2007.blogspot.com/
Enterprise Search IT Professional Training
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/enterprisesearch/ff960998
Debugging and Tracing Pipeline Extensibility Stages
https://blogs.msdn.com/b/thomsven/archive/2010/09/23/debugging-and-
tracing-fast-search-pipeline-extensibility-stages.aspx
http://techmikael.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-to-debug-and-log-fast-
search.html
Shyam Nyaran’s blog – Visual Refiner Web Part
http://www.dotnetbounce.com/archive/2011/02/06/visual-refiners-for-
sharepoint-server-2010-and-fast-search.aspx
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30. Sponsors
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