Where did those search results go?

As an avid Microsoft TechNet reader these days I stumble over small nuggets of information every now and then. What caught my attention today was a small bit about index cleanup in FAST for SharePoint a bit down the page at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg604780.aspx, and in particular the last sentence.

Index cleanup
The index cleanup stage occurs when you delete a content source or start address, or both, from a search service application. It can also occur when the content indexing connector cannot find a host supplying content: The indexing connector will look for the host during three consecutive crawls, but if the host is not found it will delete the content source and cause the index to enter the cleanup stage.

Document Thumbnails and PowerPoint Preview for your search results without installing FAST for SharePoint

Microsoft offers three different flavors of search for SharePoint 2010: Foundation, Standard and Enterprise. For each level upwards you get more feature and better search capabilities. One of the visual features included with FAST for SharePoint is Thumbnails and Previews for the search results, as listed on the comparison table below (Compare SharePoint Editions – Search).

Wouldn’t it be nice to have this feature on all versions of SharePoint? I will tell you how, as I demonstrated in a proof of concept talk at Arctic SharePoint Challenge 2011.

[Update June 7th 2011 - Check out Thumbnail Extender for SharePoint on CodePlex for a thumbnail webpart using OWA]

FAST for SharePoint Query Logger v2

I just finished off v2 of the FAST for SharePoint Query Logger and the download is available from http://fs4splogger.codeplex.com/.

New functionality added is:

• Pretty print of the executed FQL
• List any refiners used on the query
• Display the rank calculation per entry in the result

Thanks to FAST for providing a script to show the calculations, which I ported and modified for this program.

Working with crawled and managed properties via code

I was teaching a FAST for SharePoint Workshop today and we were doing labs on creating and mapping crawled properties to managed properties with the FAST Administration UI and via PowerShell. But one student wanted to know how to do this in code, hence this blog post.

Instead of having a deployment script creating your properties, you could have an event receiver which creates your mappings once a site or list is provisioned. Or when some other action is going on.

So how do you go about doing this?

Three Main Reasons Why You Should Upgrade to FAST for SharePoint

I was fortunate to be one of three finalists in SharePoint Magazine’s Aspiring Author Contest. Today the article went live and I’m quite happy about it.

You can read the article over at SharePoint Magazine, and if you like it feel free to click the Facebook Like button at the end.

The other two finalists are:
“Best Practices for SharePoint Groups” by Josh McCarty and “A Guide to Leaving Lotus Notes and Moving to Microsoft SharePoint” by Andrew Vevers.

And if you are serious about search within SharePoint, go FAST!