Arno Flapper Senior consultant @ Imtech ICT Integrated Solutions

Searching in SharePoint 2010

About me

• Senior SharePoint Consultant @ Imtech ICT Integrated

Solutions

• Frequent speaker @ Imtech Round Table sessions

• Product owner One Click Deployment for Imtech ICT

Integrated Solutions

• City counsel member in Son en Breugel

• Twitter: @FlapperA

• arno.flapper@imtech.nl

Overview

• Introduction

• Search explained

• Why search is important?

• Which search to choose?

SEARCH EXPLAINED

Why less is more?

All relevant documents

(recall)

Complete answer set

(precision)

Sweet spot

Balance between

recall, precision and relevance

So what is a good result?

• Try to find a picture of these fruits:

A good result is comprised of

• Relevance

• Ranking

• Understanding of the underlying user

question =>

Is an apple an apple or Apple© ?

WHY SEARCH IS IMPORTANT?

Searching SharePoint feels like

“Where’s Waldo?”

An Enterprise SharePoint

environment contains: • Millions of pages, lists and documents in

different formats

• Thousands of users of different IT-skill

levels

• Structured and unstructured (meta-)data

Target group approach

“Classic” user Searcher Social media user

Classic user

• Needs structure

• Wants to navigate through folders

• Needs more features due to its work

• Typically:

– Administrators

– Traditional users

• Setup:

– Classic SharePoint

Searcher

• Uses keywords to find documents

• Wants a “Google-like experience”

• Typically:

– Experienced internet users

– Knowledge workers

• Setup:

– FAST Search for SharePoint

– SharePoint Enterprise Search

Social media user

• Values the opinion of others

• Uses the rating system

• Typically:

– Social media users

– Students => Future employees

• Setup:

– Nexocial

Search habits and expectations

of “homo internetus” • A query is made up of no more than 3 keywords

• A query may only last 5 seconds

• The search engine should understand the underlying

question of the user

• The desired result should be on the first result page,

although some tolerate the second result page

Use this knowledge to tailor your search

or…

Know that you will have to tailor your search

WHICH SHAREPOINT SEARCH

TO CHOOSE?

Differences between SP 2007

and 2010

Feature Name / Area Sharepoint

Server 2007

Sharepoint

Server 2010

People And Expertise Search ○ ●

Search From Windows 7 And Windows Mobile ○ ●

Common Connector Framework For Indexing And Federation ○ ●

Scale And Performance Via Improved Topology Architecture ○ ●

Ability To Build Search-Powered Applications ○ ●

Refinement Panel And Sorting ☻

Search In Context ☻

Social Behavior Improves Relevance ☻

Thumbnails, Previews, And View In Browser ☻

2007: Wildcard search

2010 : Wildcard search

Search options in SharePoint

2010 • Basic search (Included in Foundation version)

• “Intermediate” search (Included in Standard version)

• Enterprise search (Included in Enterprise version)

and

• FAST Search for SharePoint

Enterprise Search vs FAST

Search Enterprise Search FAST Search

As Enterprise Search, but also with:

• Best visual and dynamic search

results

• Can use user context

• Can sort on any property

• Better language support

• Deep refiners with counters

• 200+ document formats supported

• Out-of-the-box thumbnail previews,

visual best best

AND:

• Property extraction !!!!!

and much more….

Out-of-the box:

• People search

• Federated search

• Refiners

• Query suggestions

• Phonetic matching

• Relevance influenced by behaviour

• Supports up to 100M documents

Which to choose when?

• Do you own an Enterprise license and is search on a

separate server? => Use FAST (it´s free for you)

• Is your SharePoint environment an enterprise

environment? => Use FAST

• Do you employ knowledge workers? => Use FAST

• You want users to really find what they where looking for

=> Use FAST

• 100M+ documents => Use FAST

• Otherwise… the standard (enterprise) search is fine for

you

Why not choose FAST?

• The installation process

• The configuration process

• The maintenance process

• The bugs / “features“

• Lack of multi-tenancy

• Because of the thumbnail preview feature (you can download this here: http://thumbextsp.codeplex.com for SharePoint search)

Demonstration

FAST Search vs Enterprise Search

Wrap up

• More information about FAST Search can be found here:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/

2149.aspx (FAST Search survival guide)

• FAST Search forum @ Microsoft:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-

US/fastsharepoint/threads

• Time (and sometimes life saver):

http://gavinmckay.wordpress.com

QUESTIONS? Imtech ICT Integrated Solutions

End of presentation

Arno Flapper

arno.flapper@Imtech.nl

Imtech ICT Integrated Solutions

Hogeweg 41| 5301 LJ, Zaltbommel

T. +31 (0)418 57 07 00 | F. +31 (0)418 57 07 66 | W. www.imtech.nl/is

www.imtech-ict.nl