Professional Microsoft® Search: FAST Search, SharePoint® Search, and Search Server

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I'd like to thank Mom and Dad for buying the Apple][ that started me on this path so many years ago. Spending that money was a leap of faith, and filled up an otherwise very boring summer.

—Mark

This book would not have been possible without the support of my wonderful wife Evie, who put up with a lot and kept encouraging me anyway.

—Jeff

Thanks to my friends who put up with “the book” as an excuse for my not being available; and to all those teachers and editors who have corrected my writing for so long that it sometimes approaches readable.

—Miles

Special thanks to Michael and Ivan for just being there, family and friends for not giving up on me during “another chapter” time, and thanks to Harry for pulling the weight of the world during this time.

—Natalya

About the Authors

Mark Bennett is the cofounder, CTO, and Senior Technical Analyst of New Idea Engineering, Inc., a Silicon Valley consultancy specializing in the business and technology of search. He speaks at industry trade shows about the current and future trends in search technology, writes for several online sites, and is active in the Open Source software community. He also cofounded and was CTO of Searchbutton, Inc., one of the earliest companies offering hosted search solutions during the dot-com boom. He has also worked on patent applications at several companies and has consulted on intellectual property cases. He was the founder of the “Stanford Quantum Groupies” online physics group, and participates in various technical and social causes. Prior to NIE and Searchbutton, Mr. Bennett served as technical support manager at Verity, Inc., where he produced the company's first Customer Care CD. His experience also includes engineering and database development positions at Access Technology and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Mark grew up in Somersworth, NH.

Jeff Fried began writing software at the tender age of 13 and has been hooked ever since. He has worked extensively with Enterprise Search, including roles as SVP, Products for the semantic search startup LingoMotors and VP, Advanced Solutions for FAST Search and Transfer. FAST's acquisition landed him at Microsoft, where he is a senior technical product manager specializing in strategic applications of search technology. Jeff has also served as CTO for Empirix (test and management software), as founder and CTO of Teloquent (call center software), and on several industry boards and standards groups. Jeff is a frequent speaker and writer in the industry, holds 15 patents, has authored more than 50 technical papers, and has led the creation of pioneering offerings in next generation search engines, networks, and contact centers. He is also a co-author of the Wrox book Professional SharePoint 2010 Development. Jeff is an amateur musician and lives with his lovely wife and three delicious children in Newton, Massachusetts.

Miles Kehoe has worked in the business of Enterprise Search for more than 20 years since he moved from technical positions at HP in 1989 and started working at Verity and later at Fulcrum Technologies. He cofounded New Idea Engineering Inc. in 1996 when it was clear that poor implementation was the biggest problem companies faced in getting Enterprise Search right. He cofounded SearchButton, Inc. in 1998 when software as a service—and what we now know as cloud-based solutions—could help companies have great site search in hours rather than months. Since 2001, New Idea Engineering has focused on both the business and the technology of search. Miles has written a number of books, authored a monthly column in HP Professional magazine, speaks at industry trade shows, and authors a number of search-related blogs. His focus now as a senior business analyst is to help organizations realize that search is a business problem as much as a technical problem. He is a private pilot and soccer fan, and lives in Cupertino, California.

Natalya Voskresenskaya has been working in the field of Information Technology for over 10 years, with experience in design, architecture, development, and deployment of Web-based applications. Since early 2000, her main area of concentration had been the development of portal solutions. Natalya delivers enterprise portal applications and business solutions, as well as portal systems architecture, design, implementation, and best practices guidance. She has been involved in SharePoint Technologies since the 2003 version. An avid blogger at http://spforsquirrels.blogspot.com/ and writer, Natalya strives to share her passion for SharePoint and its community, and often speaks at SharePoint community events and conferences. Besides SharePoint, Natalya's interest had been captured by another enterprise-level search technology, FAST. To her joy, these technologies have been combined to compliment each other's functionality. In 2009, Natalya co-founded Arcovis LLC, a business solutions consulting company focused on high quality SharePoint delivery. She was awarded the prestigious Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for the first time in 2008.

About the Technical Editors

Carl Grimm heads enterprise strategy at New Idea Engineering where he focuses on best-of-breed, novel, and emerging technologies related to information retrieval. His interests include the application of machine learning and collaborative filtering as an alternative to term frequency-inverse document frequency–based relevancy systems. Prior to NIE, Carl specialized in user experience design as the Creative Director of Interactive Media at Firebelly. He has also held senior management positions in the Enterprise Search and financial services sector. A graduate of Miami University, Carl holds his Bachelors of Science in Business Administration.

John T. Kane is currently working with Microsoft's NextGen and Incubation team and as a Search Consultant on a search-related project. He has over 20 years in Information Technology, working at everything from Fortune 100 corporations to small startup companies with emerging technologies. He has a passion for structured (SQL Server and relational databases), unstructured (FAST ESP and search engines), and social media (social search and collaboration) technologies and believes that unifying these diverse disciplines will provide businesses and customers with the best of these worlds, such as described in this book. John's work has included technical sales, premier support, requirement analysis, architectural design, and the implementation search technologies in various roles, including Search Architect. John blogs on search and social media technologies (http://www.EnterpriseSearch.NET) and can be found on Twitter (http://twitter.com/enterprisesrch).

Jason Noble serves as Neudesic's General Manager of Product Development with over 15 years of experience in building complex, mission-critical applications. Jason has extensive knowledge in advanced enterprise applications, specializing in web, database, and portal application development using Microsoft SharePoint Server. Jason is currently focused on social technologies and their adoption within the enterprise and is overseeing the development of Pulse, an enterprise social application that helps enterprises embrace this new form of communication.

Credits

Acquisitions Editor

Paul Reese

Project Editor

Sydney Jones Argenta

Technical Editors

Carl Grimm

John T. Kane

Jason Noble

Production Editor

Eric Charbonneau

Copy Editor

Foxxe Editorial

Editorial Director

Robyn B. Siesky

Editorial Manager

Mary Beth Wakefield

Associate Director of Marketing

David Mayhew

Production Manager

Tim Tate

Vice President and Executive Group Publisher

Richard Swadley

Vice President and Executive Publisher

Barry Pruett

Associate Publisher

Jim Minatel

Project Coordinator, Cover

Lynsey Stanford

Proofreader

Jen Larsen, Word One

Indexer

Johnna VanHoose Dinse

Cover Designer

Michael E. Trent

Cover Image

© istockphoto.com/ Niklas Johansson

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK IS A COLLECTIVE contribution of four authors, all with busy day jobs, and has been supported by many wonderful people. The authors are all grateful to Wrox editors Paul Reese and Sydney Jones Argenta for taking on this book and working through countless details with us. We'd also like to thank those in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group who provided encouragement and support, notably Jared Spataro, Richard Riley, Larry Kaye, Steve Peshka, Keller Smith, and Brian Barry. Special thanks go to John Kane and Carl Grimm for their technical reviews and valuable input.

Introduction

As the exponential growth of information continues both on the Internet and in private data stores, companies can find themselves drowning in their own data. They turn to Enterprise Search for the answer.

Enterprise Search provides the capability to find information across an organization. It is rooted in information retrieval, a deep discipline that focuses on developing frameworks to represent information, inquiries, and their relationships. Enterprise Search is now a technology that is pervasive, growing rapidly, and strategic to most organizations. Yet it is not widely understood in any depth, and the complex inner workings of search are mysterious to most, perhaps because it looks so simple on the outside.

The enterprise search industry has changed dramatically over the last two years, most notably with Microsoft's acquisition of FAST Search and Transfer in 2008. Microsoft has now introduced new Enterprise Search products based on FAST and updated existing ones. The result is a set of products that accommodates pretty much any Enterprise Search need, although the lineup can be confusing at times. All of these products are brand-new in 2010. They are the first search products from Microsoft that provide the scalability and capability to power all the search needs in an enterprise—internal and customer-facing search—for large and small corporations worldwide.

Professional Microsoft Search sheds light on search in the enterprise with a focus on Microsoft Search technology. It covers the full breadth of technologies from Search Server and SharePoint Server, to the new products based on FAST technology. It is intended for a range of folks, from the business manager budgeting for a new search project to the IT administrator tasked with deploying and administering these new search products, to the developer writing search applications. For all of these roles, understanding the new Microsoft search technology and how to work with it is essential for solving the information access issues they face.

Microsoft's acquisition of FAST, paired with its own previously existing search technology, now gives Microsoft a full range of search engine offerings. It offers free search, mobile search, departmental search, and high-end search that scales to handle terabytes of data and offers virtually every advanced search feature on the market today. However, with more advanced technology and product choices, Microsoft's customers and partners are now faced with more complexity in the selection, design, and implementation of search. Which product is best for a particular set of requirements? Which advanced features would work best to search a specific data set? How will all this technology integrate into the existing security and SharePoint infrastructure? How can Microsoft partners come up to speed quickly on the FAST Search for Internet Business product—including Linux-based offerings? These are the types of issues this book addresses.

Microsoft Search Has Changed

If you are familiar with Microsoft search already, you will find yourself in a new world. Microsoft has now introduced high-end search technology, and has improved its entry-level and infrastructure search offerings significantly.

A previous Wrox book entitled Professional Microsoft Search: SharePoint 2007 and Search Server 2008 was published in 2008, as Microsoft introduced its entry-level, free, downloadable search offering. (That book is still a good introduction to search, by the way.)

Our book has a deceptively similar title, but it covers two different types of FAST high-end search technology as well as much more sophisticated versions of SharePoint search and Search Server. These have advanced features including guided navigation, entity extraction, and advanced linguistics. Their architecture is more scalable and modular, allowing for full fault tolerance and extreme scale. The FAST technology in particular provides the flexibility for extensive customization.

Who This Book Is For

This book is meant for IT and software development professionals as well as for business management, content owners, and marketing staff involved with Enterprise Search. We span many topics in this book to cover the breadth of planning, deploying, administering, and developing on all the Microsoft enterprise search technologies.

Search touches many areas of an organization and interacts with a myriad of other systems, so there are a wide range of readers that can benefit from this book. We expect the core readership for this book to be those tasked with implementing and managing enterprise search—programmers developing search-driven applications as well as architects, managers, planners, and IT professionals responsible for planning, deployment, and operations. IT and development engineers and managers in companies that use SharePoint heavily will benefit from reading this book, even if they are not deeply involved with Enterprise Search. Conversely, those focused on providing great Internet experiences independent of SharePoint will find a lot of useful content.

For content owners and line-of-business managers, we discuss how companies are organizing for search success, and how to create a business plan for search that can be valuable for any organization considering implementing and managing Enterprise Search acquisition.

This book is structured in such a way that you can read it from end to end. However, we have organized the book into four parts in order to serve the breadth of readership. Depending on your interests you might read some parts deeply and skim others.

For example, business managers might wish to focus on Part I, “Introduction,” skim Parts II and III, which have more focus on how to deploy and develop, and read Part IV, “Enterprise Search 2.0—New Directions in Enterprise Search,” to understand the current and future state of hot topics in search. These sections give an overview of what you should expect in any Enterprise Search platform, regardless of the vendor.

Technical staff experienced with SharePoint and search might read Parts I and IV and skim Part III, but focus most heavily on Part II, “Implementing Search.” Those planning on deploying standalone high-end search or extending existing FAST ESP deployments might read Parts I and IV and skim Part II, but focus most heavily on Part IV, “Implementing Search with ESP.”

Within Parts II, III, and IV, the developer materials will be important for the administrator to understand, since developers and administrators have to work together to make search work. On the flip side, the administrator material will be important for developers to understand the architecture and administration of search because, without this knowledge, writing to the APIs will be more difficult. Most readers will benefit from reading all the chapters in this book.

What This Book Covers

With such a wide audience and range of different technologies, it is challenging to provide comprehensive material even in a full-length book. Luckily there is material available from other sources—a handful of other books about aspects of enterprise search as well as training and documentation available from Microsoft and its partners. The appendix at the end of this book provides a resource center for this material.

This book concentrates on material that is generally not found anywhere else. This book is entirely about the latest versions of Microsoft Enterprise Search technology, introduced in 2010. We don't cover previous versions (except briefly where it is crucial to understanding what is new in 2010). We do cover topics found in product documentation or evaluation guides, but our focus is on what you need to know. We don't cover search technology from other vendors (except at a very high level in the FAQ section of Chapter 1 and the “Choosing a search Platform” section of Chapter 2, where it is important for IT professionals and business managers to understand more than Microsoft technologies).

We do provide material that we think is unique and useful. For example, Chapter 2 has material about the Search Center of Excellence (SCOE) because those that view search technology as strategic will benefit from this practice. Chapter 3 is the only place that covers the entire Microsoft enterprise search product portfolio that we know of. Chapter 8 pays attention to multi-node configurations for standalone FAST technology because it is essential for deployment and not found elsewhere. Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 provide both a general perspective and details on how to apply Microsoft enterprise search products in these areas to social search and BI.

This book sheds light on search in the enterprise and will provide the reader with in-depth knowledge of the new Microsoft Search platforms. It has material on why—the business value and applications of search and of particular features—as well as what and how. However, it is first and foremost a technical book focused on the details of new technology and how to work with it as an IT professional or developer.

The book contains detailed examples of how to implement solutions to real-world search problems. It provides code examples that are downloadable from Wrox.com. The authors also have a site for the book at www.microsoftsearchbook.com, which will provide incremental updates to the information presented in the book. Our goal is to provide enough material that readers can make intelligent choices in deciding to implement Search Server, SharePoint Server, FAST Search for SharePoint, or FAST Search for Internet Sites and be successful in the process. This includes:

Common applications and application patterns for search and which Microsoft enterprise search products to use for each

Architecture, capability, and management details and perspective on how to successfully deploy and run search

Development patterns and code samples to help customize search and build search-driven applications

The Wrox website and the authors' website make it possible to add material over time. This was particularly important for this book as the timing kept us from including full coverage of the exciting new IMS and CTS components. While there is material about these in Part 2 of this book, there is additional material to be found on the websites.

How This Book Is Structured

Since the readership of this book is broad and the technology is varied, we have organized the book into four parts. Each part has three chapters, and a specific focus. There is something for everyone and it is not essential to read all the parts deeply to benefit from this book. However, the material in each chapter does build on previous chapters, so it is useful to at least skim part I if you jump directly to part II or part III. Within each part, the chapters are meant to be read in order.

Part I, Introduction—These chapters provide a business and application perspective. It will be useful for all readers, but particularly so for business analysts, IT managers, and marketing managers involved with search.

Chapter 1 starts with an overview of enterprise search and how it differs from public search sites. It covers the capabilities that are enabling search, and how search can serve as the glue to all of the collaborative initiatives corporations are beginning to adopt. A section on frequently asked questions is meant to directly help those communicating to their organizations about enterprise search.

Chapter 2 includes background on creating an internal business plan for search, including the planning of an enterprise search deployment and developing a successful strategy for the ongoing management of search. We discuss all of the skills required to make search work, and how successful companies organize their search operations.

Chapter 3 ends part I with an overview of all the Microsoft enterprise search options, where they are best applied, and how they fit with other Microsoft products, such as desktop search, exchange, SQL, and Bing.

Part II, Implementing Search—These chapters focus on the products built from the SharePoint 2010 codebase or the new FAST Search for SharePoint codebase. This will be of particular interest to those experienced with SharePoint.

Chapter 4 covers the search built into SharePoint Server 2010, including capabilities, architecture, and how to deploy it.

Chapter 5 covers the new FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint product, which extends on the shared capabilities covered in Chapter 4.

Chapter 6 is meant for developers; it goes through the ways to extend and customize search for all the products discussed in Part II from these codebases.

Part III, Implementing Search with ESP—These chapters focus on the products built from the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) codebase with a brief introduction to the new Content Transformation Services (CTS) and Interaction Management Services (IMS) components. It is of particular interest for those planning on deploying standalone high-end search or extending their existing FAST ESP installations.

Chapter 7 covers the product capabilities and architecture, including how to deploy and manage a simple topology.

Chapter 8 focuses on multinode and multiplatform deployment in particular, since this is not well-covered in other pubic material and is essential to most installations.

Chapter 9 includes advanced topics related to the products from these codebases, especially scalability, working with taxonomies, and specialized advanced linguistics techniques.

Part IV, Enterprise Search 2.0—These chapters cover new directions in Enterprise Search. This applies to all products, so it is relevant whether your focus is on Part II or Part III. Each chapter also includes the why, as well as the what and the how, so some readers might read Parts I and IV while skimming the rest.

Chapter 10 covers social search, both the elements that are built into the new Microsoft products as well as general techniques and trends.

Chapter 11 is about the convergence of enterprise search and business intelligence. It provides an orientation to the Microsoft BI stack, covers the new capabilities from Microsoft that integrate search and BI, and also gives an overview of the bigger picture.

Chapter 12 takes a look at the technologies and capabilities that are likely to be common in enterprise search in the future. Like the first three chapters of the book, Chapter 12 is not as deep technically as the rest of the book, but it offers a perspective useful for all audiences with advice about what you can do today.

What You Need to Use This Book

To get the most from this book, you will want copies of SharePoint Server 2010, FAST Search for SharePoint, and FAST Search for Internet Sites. One easy way to get evaluation copies is to download virtual hard drives (VHDs) from MSDN. You can find a link to these at the enterprise search resource center at technet.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch. These virtual machines, while large, are preconfigured for you so that you can start working with the technologies without having to install all the software and configure it.

Conventions

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Source Code

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PART I

Introduction

Chapter 1: What Is Enterprise Search?

Chapter 2: Developing a Strategy – The Business Plan of Search

Chapter 3: Overview of Microsoft Enterprise Search Products

1

What Is Enterprise Search?

What's in this chapter?

Defining Enterprise Search, and how it differs from Internet search portals

Giving an overview of Enterprise Search architecture and the Microsoft Search lineup

Characterizing the use of search within an organization.

Exploring Search ROI and SCOE

Answering common questions about Enterprise Search

Many people assume that “Enterprise Search” refers to search behind a corporate firewall. Although it certainly includes that, in this book we'll use a broader definition and consider Enterprise Search to be the search technology that your organization owns and controls, as opposed to the giant Internet search portals like Yahoo!, Google, or MSN/Bing.

This broad definition allows us to include and cover other search systems that power customer-facing applications and web properties that the company itself owns and controls. Such applications could include the search on a company's website home page and Tech Support area, or eCommerce shopping sites, which are also heavy users of search.

Organizations have different business objectives, and they implement search to help achieve those goals. As you'll see, Microsoft offers a wide range of products to power internal and customer-facing applications. But if you add up all the things that different organizations use search for, you come up with a pretty long list! Over the years, we've seen an amazing variety of ideas and projects, and about the only thing they have in common is being controlled by a specific company or agency, as opposed to being under the control of the giant web portals. This control issue is key; we'll come back to it again and again. If you are not happy with how Yahoo! or Google indexes your public site, there's a limited number of things you can do about it.

But if you own it (or lease it), and it's not working, you can change it. You can adjust it, tweak it, audit it, enhance it, or rip the whole darn thing out and start over! Ownership equals control!

Broadly, Enterprise Search could be thought of as all search engines except the public Yahoo!, Google, and MSN ones, since you do own and control the search engine that powers your public website or online store. And again, your usage patterns and priorities are likely different from those of the Internet portals.

This chapter introduces the concept of Enterprise Search, discussing its origins and how it differs from Internet search. It then provides a brief history of searching and discusses Microsoft's continuing commitment to improving its Search technologies, including a discussion of why Microsoft acquired the FAST ESP technologies and the current road map for integrating these technologies. You'll learn why a company would want to invest in Microsoft Enterprise Search and what some of the key components are.

Why Enterprise Search?

Enterprise Search applications deliver content for the benefit of employees, customers, partners, or affiliates of a single company or organization. You're reading this book, so we imagine you already “get it.” But if you didn't, we could say something like “if your company can afford to have search that's broken, either driving potential customers away or wasting countless hours of employees' time, perhaps you don't!”

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!