1. www.realdolmen.com
Introduction to FAST Search
Server 2010
Joris.Poelmans@realdolmen.com
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 1

2. ABOUT ME
 ECM Unit Manager @ RealDolmen
 SharePoint Server MVP
 Blog – http://jopx.blogspot.com
 Co-founder BIWUG – www.biwug.be
 Co-author
 Real World SharePoint 2010 (November 2010, Wrox)
 Real World SharePoint 2007 (August 2007, Wrox)
 SharePoint 2007, The definitive guide (September 2007,
O’Reilly)
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 2

3. AGENDA
 Improvement areas 2007 vs 2010
 Microsoft Enterprise Search – Products
 FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP)-
architecture
 FS4SP - SharePoint/FAST differentation
 Extending FAST Search
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 3

4. IMPROVEMENT AREAS 2007 VS 2010
 Social – Connect with people and expertise
 Address-book style name lookup with phonetic matching
 Improved expertise matching - mined e-mail inbox data
 Social behavior improves search; search improves My Sites
 Refinement – Find information faster
 Metadata-based refiners provide drill-down
 Related query suggestions show popular queries
 Relevance – Provide great search results
 New ingredients, more experience -> better OOB search
 Better wordbreakers in more languages
 Social Distance, tagging, click-through influence relevance
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 4

5. IMPROVEMENT AREAS 2007 VS 2010 (CTD.)
 Platform - Industrial Strength Search at High Scale
 Index partitioning -> sub-second latency at 100M items
 Full failover support
 Connector and BDC enhancements and tooling support
 TCO – Deploy and operate with less effort
 Virtualization and native 64-bit simplify deployment
 Powershell, Admin Web Parts, SCOM provide easier admin
 Extensibility - Create powerful applications based on
search
 Web parts, query OMs are public -> easier to modify
 Enhanced query syntax
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 5

6. DEMO
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 6

7. ABOUT FAST SEARCH FOR SHAREPOINT
 April 2008
 Microsoft acquires Norwegian Enterprise Search Solution Fast
Search & Transfer
 Overall Vision
 To provide a market leading enterprise search platform that
integrates with your existing infrastructure
 SharePoint Vision
 Best-in-class search, with the simplicity and low TCO of
SharePoint
 Build upon a social computing platform for a more robust search
experience
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 7
7

8. MICROSOFT ENTERPRISE SEARCH - PRODUCTIVITY
Search • Quick, easy, powerful
• Common UI Framework
Server search (for free with
• Social search features 2010 Express edition)
Common across the product line
and integration
• SharePoint platform
integration
• End user and site
administrator enablement SharePoint • OOB General Productivity
• Common Connector
Framework (BDC) Server Search with light
• Object Model, APIs and Search customization
developer XP
• Admin & deployment
capabilities
• Operations advantages
(SCOM, scripting)
FAST • Heavily customizable OOB
General Productivity Search
Search and easy to build High-
2010 Value Search Applications
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 8

9. • Search-as-you-type and • Powerful content processing
metadata-driven navigation with deep navigation
• People and expertise search • Visual search experience with
with MySite profiles document previews
• Social tagging and rating • Tailored relevance and visual
• OpenSearch federation best bets
• Business Connectivity Services • Best-in-class platform to build
• Centralized administration and search applications
System Center integration • Advanced linguistics
• Extreme scale and
performance
SharePoint Standard CAL + SharePoint Enterprise CAL +
SharePoint server license FAST Search for SharePoint server license
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 9

10. FS4SP ARCHITECTURE
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 10

11. FAST SEARCH SERVER – PHYSICAL ARCHITECTURE
 FS4SP uses SharePoint Server 2010 for query servers
and for crawling content, but adds servers in a FAST
farm. The additional servers process content, produce
index partitions, and process queries.
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 11

12. FAST SEARCH - LOGICAL ARCHITECTURE
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 12

13. SHAREPOINT SEARCH SERVICE APPLICATIONS
 FAST Search Connector (SSA)
 Crawls the content and feeds it into the FAST Search Server
2010 for SharePoint back-end
 FAST Search Query (SSA)
 The Query SSA provides query results from the content that is
crawled by the Content SSA
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 13
13

14. FAST SEARCH - SCALING
 FS4SP uses rows and columns of servers to scale
 Adding more columns of servers increases content
processing capacity linearly. Adding more rows of
servers increases the query processing ability.
Fault tolerance is provided by deploying a
minimum of two rows.
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 14

15. SEARCH – ITEM LEVEL SCALING
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 15

16. FAST/SHAREPOINT
DIFFERENTATION
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 16

17. END USER PERSPECTIVE
Excellent OOB relevance Same capabilities, plus:
Federated results Broader, better language support
PC, phone, or browser access Broader query syntax
Same capabilities, plus:
Metadata based refiners
Deep refiners with counts
Related searches
Similarity search
View in Browser
Sorting on any property
Phonetic & nickname matching
Relevance and refiners Same capabilities
Integrated presence
Click-through drives relevance
Colleague & Expertise suggestions Same capabilities
Query suggestions
Thumbnails & Scrolling Previews
Visual Best Bets
User context from user profile
Multiple relevance profiles
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 17

18. FAST SEARCH – END USER
PERSPECTIVE DEMO
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 18

19. Sorting on any
VISUAL, CONVERSATIONAL SEARCH property
Visual Best Bets
Scrolling PowerPoint
Refinement with Previews
counts
on any property
Thumbnails
Similarity
Search
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 19
19

20. IT PRO PERSPECTIVE
Enterprise Scale-out (to 100M docs)
Same capabilities, plus:
Full Fault Tolerance
Extreme scale-out
Native 64 bit; Hyper-V support
Wizard - driven installation
Same capabilities
Consolidated search dashboard
PowerShell support
SCOM support Same capabilities
Full search reporting
Full set of connectors OOB
Same capabilities, plus:
Easy to add new sources via BDC
Enterprise Web Crawler
Strong security
Content Processing pipeline
Metadata Extraction
Easy setup of User Context,
Visual Best Bets, Promotion
Give end users control over sorting,
ranking, navigation
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 20

21. DEVELOPER PERSPECTIVE
Public Web Parts Public Web Parts with high end capabilities
New connector framework
Same capabilities
Integrated with BCS
Integrate search with BI, Workflow, Integrated using high-end
Social, & Collab search capabilities
BDC tooling built into SPD
Same capabilities
Application tooling in VS2010
Add custom property extractors
Extend content processing
Include external data in relevance
Build multiple relevance profiles
Leverage FQL to create geosearch,
user-selected influencers, and much more
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 21

22. EXTENDING SEARCH
 Extend OOB Web Parts – or Create New Ones
 Location Awareness
 Geo-Search using SortFormula()
 FQL (Fast Query Language)
 Using Document Vectors to add extra UI elements –
e.g. Word Cloud Web Part
 Query Language Expressiveness
 Soft boost (relevance control) using Xrank operator in FQL
 Examples:
 Boost all documents that contain a selected persons name or
phrase
 Use user comments, social tagging or content rating to impact
rlevance
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 22

23. USEFUL RESOURCES
 FAST Search Server for SharePoint
Deployment & Configuration Guide
 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyI
D=a65aef6f-bc99-4b29-81bb-
37fce8ad6ea7&displaylang=en
 FAST Search Server for SharePoint
Known Issues
 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyI
D=8101DA55-1AF2-41A1-89EF-
15536A8000F2&displaylang=en
 FAST Search Server for SharePoint
Cmdlets Overview
 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid
=0A91AE47-8C6F-447E-8084-
2EF7208837AE&displaylang=en
 Professional Microsoft Search: Fast
Search, SharePoint Search and Search
Server (Wrox, october 2010)
NOVEMBER 28, 2011 | SLIDE 24
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