In the wake of our coverage of last month's SharePoint Conference sessions, this is the seventh in a series of posts documenting the keynotes and sessions I attended at the Microsoft "Airlift" event for Office 2010. This four-day event took place in Seattle during the first week of June, was open to participants in Microsoft's Technical Adoption Program (TAP), and in essence took the form of a mini-SharePoint Conference.
Senior Product Manager Jeff Fried was the presenter for a session dedicated to providing an overall snapshot of enterprise search in Office 2010. During the course of the session, Jeff discussed how all of the pieces fit together, and walked the crowd through a demo.
Jeff explained that the goal was to "bring the power of high-end search to everyone," and mentioned FAST Search, Search Server and Search Server Express, with the latter two being entry-level solutions. FAST Search for SharePoint is the new offering, announced earlier this year and, with it in place, enterprise search in SharePoint Server 2010 features added capabilities and an enhanced architecture and platform. With the goal of allowing users to "get better answers faster," Jeff demonstrated the custom filters and search refinement options available in 2010.
Discussing advances in deployment and management, Jeff referred to core architectural enhancements as representing "industrial-strength search," and also mentioned the simplified installation process. Dev enhancements in the new release include query federation framework, and new indexing connector framework.
Moving on to FAST Search for SharePoint, Jeff mentioned that FAST was acquired by Microsoft just over a year ago, and that FAST extends the capabilities of SharePoint Server as more of a "conversational" search experience. Examples of shaping the user experience include: visual "best bets," the ability to promote/demote results, and thumbnails as visual cues where appropriate (video, pictures, PowerPoint, etc.). Property extraction allows users to leverage existing metadata in new ways, mining content to add metadata where there previously was none. Search indexing connectivity brings in content which provides users with that much more rich metadata with which to work.
Rich extensibility features which will be available exclusively for FAST Search for SharePoint users in 2010 include Fast Query Language (FQL) and the configurability and extensibility.
Read our complete coverage of the Office 2010 Airlift sessions:
Posted
Nov 09 2009, 05:40 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.