A side-by-side approach for upgrading SharePoint search to FAST

More and more businesses are upgrading their existing SharePoint 2010 search solutions to FAST Search for SharePoint. Doing so will most likely require scheduled downtime when you make the actual switch.

This can be avoided by cleverly upgrading your existing Search Service Application to a FAST Query SSA.

Want to learn more? Head over to my article at NothingButSharePoint.com for the details - http://pzl.no/qKacHz.

Improved relevancy with SP1

This was listed as one of the updated in SP1, and was actually released in the December CU. So what has really changed?

For all the default Metadata Categories in FAST for SharePoint the default behavior is to map auto-discovered crawled properties to the full-text index.

This leads to many irrelevant fields being searchable. The update is in fact adding many of these fields to an ignore list, setting the IsMappedToContents property of the crawled property to false.

The full list of the added ignored properties can be found in the function ImproveDefaultSchema in C:\FASTSearch\installer\scripts\include\commontasks.ps1.

The relevancy improvement is to avoid garbage into the index.

Thanks to Microsoft for providing this information.

Upgrade from 32bit Office 2007 to 64bit Office 2010

I downloaded the beta of Office 2010, but wanted to go with the 64bit version, since one exists. 64bit Windows 7 deserves a 64bit Office.

My main concern since an upgrade is not possible from 32bit to 64bit was that my Outlook account wouldn’t be kept. To make sure I had a backup of it I exported the profile from registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook

I didn’t bother backing up any files, since everything is on the Exchange server.

My next step was to uninstall Office 2007, did a reboot, and started Office 2010 installations. Did a reboot, started Outlook and it all worked. The registry key had not been removed upon uninstalling 2007, so Outlook 2010 detected the profile and used it without any work on my part.

Conclusion is that you can just uninstall 2007 and install 2010 and keep your Outlook settings. But it never hurts to backup your outlook registry key just to be sure.

I had trouble activating but found a solution at http://blog.hznet.nl/2009/11/having-troubles-activating-office-2010-beta/.

Windows 7 beta - issues

Here's my first comments and experiences with Windows 7.

I downloaded Windows 7 this weekend and did an upgrade of a 32bit Vista sp1 laptop. The upgrade itself took 4 hours which is ok since I have a lot of stuff installed. The system itself behaves much more snappy than Vista. Startup and shutdown is quicker, hibernation is quicker, basically the OS response time is much better.

Issues which I had after the upgrade:

• Only one cpu core was working. This was due to incorrect ACPI driver being used. Resolution was to disable multi core in the bios and let Windows redetect the cpu. Then shutdown and enable the second core again. This made Windows enable both cores.
• Daemon tools is not working (SPTD driver)
• Had to do a repair install on Acrobat Reader 9 and Java in order for them to work in IE 8
• My built-in Broadcom network card is not working properly (BCM5906M) It won't access the LAN at work and get an IP address. Have to debug a bit more to find out more about the issue.
• Toshiba bluetooth device is not working properly. Vista drivers won't work and Windows built-in driver are just as crap as Vista. Meaning basically not supporting much at all.

I'll report more issues when they appear, but for now I give two thumbs up for this release!