Microsoft Virtual Labs for Search

Interested in learning more about how to develop great search solutions and what SharePoint 2010 can offer in terms of search capabilities?

Head over to the SharePoint Server Virtual Labs page at MSDN and check out the newly released labs on search.

The labs are virtual machines accessed via your browser and are accompanied by a script to walk you thru the exercises.

Note that some of the labs seem to be missing indexed content, so you might need to kick off a crawl before starting. The machines are also quite slow, and you might have better luck running the “2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine” locally instead. It’s more or less the same machine as provided in the labs.

Prototyping pipeline stages in PowerShell

The defacto way of creating a custom pipeline stage in FAST for SharePoint is to create an executable file which reads and writes an xml file. This usually implies having Visual Studio available and compiling and deploying a new file each time you make a change in order to test it in a proper pipeline.

To the rescue comes PowerShell. Since all FAST servers have PowerShell installed you can create a PowerShell script and use this. All you need is notepad This gives the flexibility of trying out stuff without recompiling. But the cost is speed of execution. So you might want to port the code over to e.g. C# when you are done testing your code.

How not to name a configuration setting

Recently while looking over some FAST for SharePoint labs one of the exercises had you edit a property called:

AllowNonCleanUpClaimsCacheForTestingOnly.

The production setting for this is “false”, which will make the system do cleanup of a claims cache.

But reading the name and what it actually does is very hard due to using both the words “Allow”, “Non” and “TestingOnly”. You have a positive word, a negative word and a specific case where the property is valid, all in the same name.

The proper name for this should in my opinion be:

CleanUpClaimsCache

where the production value should be “true”. With a comment to explain why you would set this to false, e.g. in a test scenario.

FAST Search for SharePoint Query Logger

Inspired by a blog post by Neil I created a log monitor which will allow you to view and save the xml returned from the internal QR server in FAST. Very useful for debugging queries. You can find the tool at http://fs4splogger.codeplex.com.

Search Features vs. Security

One of the most popular search features on the web is the query suggestion feature, or a derivative, related queries.

Presentation at Norwegian SharePoint Community

I did a presentation at the Norwegian SharePoint Community (#NSPUG) meet-up yesterday. The presentation and code samples can be downloaded at http://cid-9ecc38025e460fc4.office.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/%5ENNSPUG%202011-02-15

The presentation covers how you can utilize FS4SP as a data retrieval API outside the regular search page. The samples are simple, but shows the idea of expanding your toolbox with search as an API.

Using the SharePoint Search “Best Bet” feature to redirect to a landing page

As described on TechNet:

Best Bets are recommended results. Best Bets can link to recommended Web sites, data stores, and documents. When a user includes a keyword or one of its synonyms in a query, the search results page features links to its associated Best Bets in a prominent position.

This can look something like this for the search term “search” on my sample site:

How to: Frame a search center with little work

Lately I have encountered several customs who deploy search from SharePoint 2010, but they still have other solutions running on MOSS 2007 or other portal frameworks. Instead of creating custom solutions using the search service on SharePoint 2010, framing is a quick solution to get you up and running.
One way is to create a custom master page to replace v4.master for the search center, but this requires html knowledge and tinkering. In many cases it’s just as easy to go the configuration way.

How to “spy” the data in a custom pipeline extensibility stage with FS4SP

In the old FAST a much used stage during development is the “Spy” stage. What this stage does is dump out a log file of all current attributes and the values assigned to them at that point in the content processing pipeline.

Fortunately for us, this stage still exists in FS4SP, and it might help you when testing and debugging your crawling.

Will your FAST Search Server for SharePoint work in a year?

That depends on what you are doing with your certificates. If you followed the installation instructions you are most likely using a self-signed certificate created during installation which is only valid for a year.