SharePoint FEST, Denver–May 19th session: Integration of the SharePoint Search 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint 2007 portal

I’m speaking at the SharePoint Fest in Denver on May 19th. I’ll be presenting on one of my favorite topics, here is the session topic and the abstract:

Integration of the SharePoint Search 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint 2007 portal

With the release of the SharePoint 2010, Microsoft had release the true enterprise search solution, FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP). But what about companies who have invested heavily in 2007 implementations and while planning to upgrade in the future want to take advantage of FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 now. This session covers the integration of SharePoint 2007 and FAST search for SharePoint 2010 and benefits from the business and end-user perspective that Search 2010 brings into the 2007 portal solution.

The session is going to be informative to everyone and not just IT Pros and Devs, it will also include demos.

Come and say Hi. I’ll see you there

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Fest 2011

FAST Search: the infamous “Failed to initialize session with document engine: Unable to resolve Content distributor”

In the numerous FAST configurations the error above is the most common and one that I wanted to share my experiences with. There is a number of issues that might be causing this error and renders FAST Search unable to crawl. This issue can be from the initial configuration of FAST, but can also be introduced later on if you modify the deployment.XML and reconfigure FAST.

Here is the list of the most common ways of resolution and is in the order of :

1. Secure the connector by running

.\SecureFASTSearchConnector.ps1 -certPath "path of the certificate\certificatename.pfx" -ssaName "name of your content SSA" -username "domain\username"

replacing the necessary parameters with the values for your environment. Here are the detailed instructions http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381261.aspx

2. Check if the domain and user name is reflecting the details of the user running the SharePoint Server Search 14 (OSearch14) service. The user account running Server Search 14 service should be the same as the user name used to secure the connector.

3. Make sure that the content distributor URL is the same as in the Install_Info file located within your FASTSearch folder or the same as in the fastsearch\etc\contentdistributor.cfg  file – sometime that might be the issue is the value in the install_info file is not the same as the cfg file, use the URL from the CFG file.

Hope it helps.

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: FAST Search Crawl,FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

New York Enterprise Search User Group celebrates its Two Year Anniversary

The New York Enterprise Search User Group celebrates its Two Year Anniversary by welcoming back the speaker who started it all, Nathan Treloar!
We hope that you will join the festivities, bring a friend as we end the year on high note and a look into the future of Enterprise Search! 

DECEMBER MEETING - Wednesday, December 14th 5:30PM

REGISTER TODAY

SUBJECT
Video Search and the Rise of Time-coded Metadata
Searching video certainly isn’t a new thing. Youtube has been with us for years now, after all. But when it comes to emerging trends in video search, both on the Web and in the enterprise, there are signs that we are entering a new age. The time-coded nature of video and the ability (or lack thereof) to search and navigate *inside* video content represent a new frontier for search that is only just now coming to light.
In this interactive, demo-rich presentation, Nate Treloar, VP of Strategic Markets for RAMP, will walk through the latest trends in video search and show how the rise of time-coded metadata is changing how people discover and engage with online video.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Nathan Treloar, is VP of Technology for Strategic Alliances at RAMP where he is responsible for expanding RAMP’s industry leading Content Optimization solutions into new markets. Prior to RAMP, Nate was the Principal Search Technology Evangelist in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group and held responsibility for the group’s technology innovation and evangelism programs.
Nate came to Microsoft through the acquisition of FAST, where he was Senior Vice President of Technology and a member of the leadership team that took FAST from an entry level player to a leader in the enterprise search market. In a career spanning more than two decades, Nate has held key executive positions for search, text mining, publishing, and knowledge management software and solutions. He has advised hundreds of world’s largest companies and government agencies on applications of search and search related technologies.
ADDRESS
1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor NY, NY 10104

SharePoint ShopTalk Announces New Video Blog! and new panelists!!

Join us for the next SharePoint ShopTalk: Thursday, March 24th 12:30PM - 1:30PM EST.

You may register today and join the SharePoint ShopTalk Group on LinkedIn to submit questions prior to the event. You may also tweet your questions to @spshoptalk as well ask questions live! We encourage participants to send questions in advance so our panel of experts may answer at their highest capacity.
Sign up for this month's Panelist Spotlight - "Tips & Tricks" 3.31.11:
Integration of SharePoint Search 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint 2007 Portal

SharePoint ShopTalk Announces New Video Blog!
View last week's upload: .NET Developer Learning SharePoint
New Videos are posted every Thursday!

We look forward to hearing from you as well as the continued sharing of SharePoint knowledge. 
Audio Call-in Number: (760) 569-0111

Audio Passcode: 724468#

Click here to register for the next SharePoint ShopTalk. 

FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS) Deep Dive–April 13, 2011

I’m happy to announce the Enterprise Search User Group meeting for April. Save the date

This session will provide a technical deep dive of FAST Search for Internet Sites focused on the main components: Content Transformation Services (CTS), Interaction Management Services (IMS) and the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP).  Learn what the main components are and how they work together to give you one of the most powerful search platforms on the market.  We will build an end-to-end experience with a focus on explaining how the different components work and interact. 

SPEAKER
Runar Olsen, is a Senior Architect with Microsoft's Enterprise Search Practice.  At this time with Microsoft he has been involved with large scale and complex internet site deployments, and recently focusing on the new Enterprise Search 2010 product lineup. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the Norwegian University of Tromsø (UITØ). 
In this talk Runar Olsen will provide a technical deep dive of FAST Search for Internet Sites focused on the main components: Content Transformation Services (CTS), Interaction Management Services (IMS), and the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP).  Learn what the main components are and how they work together to give you one one of the most powerful search platforms on the market. We will build an end-to-end  experience with a focus on explaining how the different components work and interact.

MEETING AGENDA
5:30 PM - Networking (Food and Drinks)

6:00 PM - News and Highlights

6:10 PM - A word from our sponsor

6:30 PM - Speaker Presentation

7:25 PM - Wrap-Up and Give-Aways

7:30 PM - After Meeting Social

ADDRESS
1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor NY, NY 10104

To attend this meeting, REGISTER TODAY!

Security Reminder
Register at least 2 days in advance to secure a building pass, otherwise one will be created at building security which will stall your entry.

Behind the Scenes of the Contoso/ Consulting Search-Driven Application Demo

This presentation promises to be one of the best “behind the scenes” on developing search-driven applications.

Do not forget to register for our Enterprise Search User Group meeting, held every second Wednesday of the month at:

1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor NY, NY 10104

FEBRUARY MEETING - Wednesday, February 9th, 2011
SUBJECT
Behind the Scenes of the Contoso Consulting Search-Driven Application Demo
SPEAKERS
Richard Frenkel, CTO Ceonex has 30 years experience in the IT field, initially building systems for mainframes and later for the client/server environment....
Theodore Agranat, User Interface Architect and Design Manager is an accomplished manager of design and user interface architect.  He has built the design side of Ceonex from the beginning....
Dimitri Ayrapetov, Senior SharePoint Consultant has seven years of experience in IT, with the past four years primarily working with SharePoint technologies.... 
Read more about our speakers here

This session will provide a technical drilldown of how the Contoso Consulting Search-Driven Application demo was built. The Search Driven Demo builds on the standard FAST Search for SharePoint web parts to create a "Search Driven Application": in this case a company Knowledge Center. The application includes "visual refiners" that present the information in standard text based refiners visually and allow user interaction, a visual "work area" to which specific items from the result set can be saved, and a power point previewer that allows PowerPoint presentations to be viewed and slides selected within the search results, among other customizations. The presenters will discuss the application architecture and custom development efforts required to build this custom Search-Driven Application.
Included in the drilldown will be:
• Brief run through of the demo to show the features
• Breakdown of OOB functionality, extended configuration, and custom developed controls
• Walk through of the custom graphical refiner controls (architecture and code)
• Customization of rendering components
• Implementation of “My Workspace”
• If time and interest allow we may also discuss the use of PowerShell to fully script the configuration of the demo application on SharePoint Enterprise, and how we customized the OOB visual styling.
As part of the discussion, the presenters will discuss pros/cons to the various approaches and challenges faced during implementation. The presentation will include technical drill down, but could be of interest to anyone interested in what is possible in customizing search or building search applications. 
Register Today

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Search User Group,FAST Search for SharePoint 2010,Enterprise Search

SharePoint Search 101:How does an indexer work? What is Lemmatization? What is Tokenization?

What happens when you index content?

Before the content is indexed the process that content goes through has to ensure that it is normalized and tokenization took place. Before content is tokenized the language of the content is identified and the normalization identifies accented characters and maps it into non-accented to enable phonetic searches. Tokenization process treats characters such as spaces, question marks, commas as word delimiters and splits the content into actual words that should be indexed and processed further. Lemmatization feature adds morphological and spelling variations to the content as well as misspelled or phonetic variants. This allows for search for all morphological and spelling variations as well as misspelled forms or phonetic variants to happen when people execute search queries. Phonetic search for names is available with SharePoint Search 2010 OOTB, more advanced linguistic features are available with FAST Search for SharePoint 2010.

There are several types of lemmatization:

1. Stemming - where the stemma is identified and applied to a word, ex: “doing” has “do” as it’s stemma

2. Lemma - where stemma of the word “worst” would be missed by stemming, but the lemma of the word as “bad” would be identified

3. Verbs - “greeting” may be a form of a noun or can have a verb “to greet” as it’s base, verb or noun dictionaries can provide the right level of lemmatization.

Lemmatization is language specific and allows to provide more relevant search result to end user and enhance the recall of search results.

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,Search 2010,lemmatization