Thumbnails and previews are a very useful aspect of FAST Search for SharePoint. This feature makes the results of a search query visual, allowing users to recognise the right content faster! Here’s an interesting post from Beyond Search on this topic – it should be noted that document previews is in fact a FAST Search for SharePoint feature, [...]
Comperio consultant, Marcus Johansson, co-authors ‘Working with Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint’. As most search techies will testify, the life of a consultant working on complex enterprise search projects with large customers, can be quite a demanding one. To commit to investing personal time, outside of all this project work is, to put [...]
Here is a way to build up a really simple image search application using HTML, CSS and JQuery. One thing that can be improved about most image search apps is that browsing search history is sloooow. This image search app provides a neat solution to the history/speed issue by simply displaying results in a push-pop [...]
In FAST Search for SharePoint (FS4SP), Best Bets are result items that are added manually to the results of a search query. But unless you edit the web part, FS4SP will also show you the Keyword Definition along with the Best Bets. Or…?
Just like in most systems that contains data, each indexed content item in FAST Search for SharePoint (FS4SP) is associated with a certain primary key. No surprises here – in order to update or remove an item from the index, the system must be able to uniquely identify it. For the most part, Microsoft has [...]
The presentation I gave on behalf of Comperio at the 2011 Sharepoint Conferance in Anaheim California is now online here. It discusses a strategy for overcoming the challenges that implementers will face when creating internal search applications. In brief, everybody knows that user-experience (UX) is paramount, so why do organisational dynamics conspire to prioritise UX [...]
Now that this year’s SharePoint conference has come to an end, and although we’ve still haven’t left sunny California just yet, we’d like to take the opportunity to share our view of the last very exciting few days. The Microsoft SharePoint Conference is consistently the number one event on SharePoint. This time, even though it [...]
In FAST Search for SharePoint (FS4SP), there are two methods for crawling web sites. Either use the built-in SharePoint crawler on your FAST Content SSA, or use the far more advanced FAST Search Web crawler. For most small web crawls, it’s not necessary to use the latter, but instead much easier to set up a [...]
I’m working on a SharePoint feature which will automatically add a federated search location on feature activation and which will delete it on de-activation. To accomplish this I use the Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceApplication class, and more specifically the AddNewLocationConfiguration and DeleteLocationConfiguration methods. I tried to use the same methods of the SearchServiceApplicationProxy first, but there seems to [...]
When building IMS search flows in FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS), I typically deploy them using the Add-Flow PowerShell cmdlet. One thing that always bugs me, is that there’s no easy way of testing the flows right away from the command-line. Usually, this isn’t a problem; you can always set up a new test [...]
