Search in SharePoint 2010

Just SharePoint vs with FAST

Sharon RichardsonJoining Dots May 2010

Usual Disclaimer:

All content in this presentation is for information purposes only with no warranty or guarantees

regarding its accuracy

All product names, logos, brands and other trademarks are the property of their respective

trademark holders

In 2008, Microsoft acquired FAST to deliver more advanced

indexing and search capabilities than are possible with just

SharePoint

This presentation shows some of the differences between search in SharePoint 2010 vs SharePoint 2010 with FAST when used for internal purposes (intranets etc.)

SharePoint Search vs FASTArea Feature SharePoint FAST

User Interface Basic refiners Deep, customizable refiners People search/social tag ranking Federated Search Document preview and thumbnails Best Bets Visual and Contextualized Best Bets

Ranking Complex ranking algorithms Customization Basic ranking customization

Extensive ranking schema management Keyword-based document boosts Sorting

Contextualization Query-based Group-based

SharePoint Search UI

Basic refiners based on metadata

Find people as well as docs

Include federated search results

FAST Search UI

Custom refiners and results count

Thumbnails and in-page preview

Sort by any property

&Find Similar

FAST Contextualised ResultsSalesEngineer

Single query, different results based on user profile

Visual best bets

Engineer and Sales see different results (or different order of results) prioritised based on their role, including best bets and people matches

FAST Advanced Content Processing

• Character Normalisation– Identifies input with/without special characters– e.g. Bjørn = Bjorn and vice versa

• Lemmatization– Stemming with context– e.g. ‘better’ can expand to include ‘good’

• Custom refiners– Entity extraction from applications, such as ‘Company’

• Custom rank models and relevance– Anchor authority, Query authority, Freshness, Quality– Query language to boost relevance of keywords

Should you just use SharePoint or do you need FAST?

My advice:

Evaluate the maturity of your current internal search solution.

If you’re thinking ‘What search solution…’ then you probably don’t need FAST yet.

Start with SharePoint 2010.

For more information, questions and comments…

Slides by: Sharon RichardsonWeb: http://www.joiningdots.comTwitter: @joiningdots

SharePoint Guide: http://www.sharepointsharon.com

The 13th Slide…

There are other search engines too…

If you’re doing an evaluation/comparison:

• SharePoint 2010 would come up against the Google Search Appliance (GSA)

• FAST would face Autonomy

There are other search tools available but these are the ones I keep an eye on…