The Past, Present and Future of Search: A Round Table Discussion

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SUBJECT
The Past, Present and Future of Search: A Round Table Discussion

Last month, The NY Enterprise Search User Group celebrated its Two Year Anniversary. This month we would like to take a look back at past talks, hear how user group members are currently using Search, as well as the group's vision of the future of Search.
Carlos Valcarcel Technical Solutions Professional at Microsoft, Natalya Voskresenskaya SharePoint MVP & Search Engineer along with Paul Olenick SharePoint and Search Engineer at Arcovis will lead a Round Table Discussion around Search.
Take a trip down memory lane here: Past Meetups

ABOUT THE LEADERS
Carlos Valcarcel has been in software development since the mid-80's working in financial services, insurance and technology....Read More.
Natalya Voskresenskaya has been working in the field of Information Technology for over 10 years. With experience in design, architecture...Read More.
Paul Olenick is a Sr. SharePoint and Enterprise Search Consultant for Arcovis (Gold Partner and Microsoft V-TSP) where he leads projects for large enterprise customers across multiple verticals...Read More.

Leonardo Souza, Senior Technical Instructor at FAST University/Microsoft is a professional with thirteen years experience working with Microsoft...Read More.
Michael McCabe currently works as an Information Architect for Gig Werks and focuses on the SharePoint product. He has 18 years experience...Read More.

Drive with FAST search for SharePoint 2010 installation is running out of space

On one of the projects I was seeing recurring behavior where “D:\FAST Search\data\ftStorage\sequences” folder quickly fills up with files like storage_6a.data , storage_cd.meta thus causing the drive to run out of space. That location is used to store index (“fixml”) information used for fault tolerance (ft) in a backup indexing row. We have deleted these files at some point since there was an environment health issue as well, hoping that fixing the environment issue was to blame for causing this folder to fill up, but it came back again and quickly filled up the drive. In searching for the cause of the problem here is what was found.

1. It’s likely this is happening if one or more servers are configured as a “secondary” indexing row.  See this example from a FS4SP deployment.xml file:

<searchcluster>

                <row id="0" index="primary" search="true" />

                <row id="1" index="secondary" search="true" />

</searchcluster>

The options are to disable the secondary/backup indexer(s), or add more disk space to the backup row.

If the data was deleted in this folder, it’s likely the backup index data is out of sync, and will need to be resynchronized with this procedure:

“Synchronize the primary and the backup indexer servers (FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint)” - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg482028.aspx

2. In our case the box that had this issue was not configured as a secondary row, but was a primary row.

The deployment.xml has not used row 0 as the primary row (which is required, ref http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff354931.aspx#element_searchcluster)

This caused the ftstorage files to neither be placed on the intended server, nor rotated and thus eating up the disk space.

Here is an example of the deployment

<host name="FAST01 ">

<admin/>

<crawler role="single"/>

<webanalyzer lookup-db="true" link-processing="true" max-targets="2" server="true"/> <document-processor processes="4"/> <content-distributor id="0"/> <indexing-dispatcher/>

<query/> <searchengine column="0" row="0"/> </host>

<host name="FAST02 ">

<document-processor processes="4"/>

<content-distributor id="1"/> <indexing-dispatcher/>

<query/>

<searchengine column="0" row="1"/>

</host>

<searchcluster>

<row id="1" search="true" index="primary"/> <row id="0" search="true" index="secondary"/>

</searchcluster>

Once the IDs were reconfigured and then I ran Set-FASTSearchConfiguration on the admin box as well as the non-admin. The issue went away

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: FAST Search For SharePoint 2010 reconfigure,deployment.xml

NOINDEX Handling by FAST and SharePoint Search

Just recently I had to go through troubleshooting of content being indexed by FAST and/or SharePoint Search and wanted to share experience and some collected wisdom.

Here is the case, very common: the client has branded master page that includes menu navigation items, these items were being indexed. Where in case of searching for “Vacation form” would bring every page that is using this master page with menu items, simply because link to vacation form was included into the navigation menu on this master page. After the client included ”noindex”, which works for FAST as well as for SharePoint it seemed to work. Few weeks later when I came onsite, I noticed that the Search SSAs for SharePoint as well as for FAST had their content sources misconfigured and without even knowing the client was using just SharePoint search for everything. At this point I’ve reconfigured the content sources so only “people” search is being server by SharePoint search and the rest of the content is searched by FAST. This is when we have noticed the same problem where menu items were being indexed again without respecting the NOINDEX tag. Once we purged the index and reindexed everything again, it all worked.

Here are the tags and the explanation of how they work:

1) <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> : Supported using both crawlers, although differently. FAST crawler will drop these items. SP crawler will not drop the items, they will be dropped by the FAST pipeline. But the result is the same for both.

2) <noindex> This text will not be indexed </noindex> : Not supported regardless of crawler.

3) <div class =”noindex”> This text will not be indexed </div> : Supported. This is transparent to both crawlers, will be filtered in the FAST pipeline.

4) <span class =”noindex”> : Supported by FAST Search back-end but not SharePoint search.

5) SP crawler fix to ensure that the <meta name="xxx" content="noindex" /> was passed to the FAST pipeline (KB 2276336)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2276336

Part of the August 2010 CU.

Hope this helps to others.

Enjoy Holidays!!!!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint search,fast search for sharepoint,noindex tags

Technorati Tags: Fast search for sharepoint,noindex,sharepoint search

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 administration screenshots (Central Administration)

Many times I get a question as to how granular can you make the administration of the FAST, what administrative options each level provides and what does it look like.

In the previous post I shared screenshots of administrative interfaces that are available to site collection admins. In this post I wanted to share the screenshots of Administration UI for FAST from the Central administration.

Search Administrators have the ability to control the following settings:

Here are some screenshots with explanations.

Central Administration – Content source configuration

Central Administration – Configure authoritative pages

Central Administration – Content Source overview

Central Administration – Crawl log

Central Administration – Crawled Properties (Metadata)

Central Administration – FAST Content SSA overview

Central Administration – FAST Query SSA overview

Central Administration – Managed Properties (metadata fields)

Central Administration – New Crawl rule

Central Administration – URL Blocking

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: FAST Search Aadministration

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 administration screenshots (Site settings)

Many times I get a question as to how granular can you make the administration of the FAST, what administrative options each level provides and what does it look like.

In this post I wanted to share the screenshots of Administration UI for FAST from the site collection admin level as well as Central administration.

Site collection administrators have ability to provide administration for:

1. Best Bets
2. Visual Best Best
3. Content promotion and demotion
4. User context

You do not need to make your business folks (that would be more suitable to customize the search experience) Search Admins and give them access to Central Administration site where they can become quite dangerous. you can get access to the following administration areas through the site settings page on the site collection level.

Here are some screenshots with explanations.

Site collection – Site Settings

Best Bets configuration

Keyword, Phrases and Synonyms configuration

Add site demotion

Add site promotion (boosting content from a site)

Add user context

Manage Use Context

Add visual Best Bet

In the next post I’ll put the screenshot of administrative interfaces that are available for the Search Admins from the Central Administration site

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: FAST Search for SharePoint administration,best bets,visual best bets,user context,site demotion and promotion.

SPC 2011 : Making the Move to SharePoint 2010 - Search First

I’m speaking at the SPC in Anaheim, California in October. SPC had be always to me THE SharePoint Conference to attend. If you still did not register you might be missing the most important SharePoint event of the year.

If you are there, check out my session that I’ll be doing along side with Mark Stone (Microsoft) and Harry Jones (Arcovis) and learn one upgrade strategy for 2010 that no one told you about.

Here is the session abstract.

Most of us have heard about the enhancements and power offered by SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search, but many do not realize they can take advantage of it before upgrading their 2007/MOSS environment. In this session we will cover how to leverage Search for SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint today as part of your organizations roadmap to 2010. We'll demonstrate the integration of SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint Search 2010 from the end-user perspective and discuss the many benefits “Search First” offers to an organization and their users.

http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/sessiondetailsShort.aspx?sessionguid=90a461cd-d717-45be-b09b-c82a1f9fefdc

Technorati Tags: SPC 2011,Search First,SharePoint 2010 upgrade

Why Social Networking on SharePoint 2010?

I recently wrote an article on social networking on SharePoint platform and wanted to share it with you.

The SharePoint 2010 platform offers a wide variety of core features including document management, records management, BI, search, workflow and social networking to name a few. Microsoft and its partners have done a great job of showcasing the value of these features and have shared strategies to help organizations take advantage of them. However, of these core features, it is my observation that the Social Networking aspects of SharePoint 2010 are underutilized by customers and therefore the full potential of their implementations are not realized.

The most common objection I have seen to the notion of social networking within the enterprise has to do with a misconception that social networking platforms are not productive in the work environment. I often see is a misguided comparison made to Facebook and other external social networking sites which management views as time-wasters. Other barriers to adoption include uncertainties about allowing uncensored comments by users, a difficulty in justifying the investment and the struggle involved with getting buy-in from the business.

Read more on MVP blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2011/07/25/mvps-for-office-365-why-social-networking-on-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Technorati Tags: Social Networking,SharePoint 2010 Social Networking