Decks, Source Code and Resources from October 19 MSPUG Meeting

Thanks a lot to the folks who showed up yesterday at the Mississauga User Group meeting. Also I’d like to thank Ray Outair for his efforts in running the group in celebration of its first year anniversary. I have posted the deck for my presentation “Leveraging SharePoint 2010 Search Technologies” and the source code of the demo web part demonstrating FQL capabilities on SoftForte site here.

If you are planning search deployment I highly recommend checking out technical diagrams on TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/cc263199.aspx. There are 4 diagrams there dedicated specifically to Search. Also check out downloadable content here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/cc262788.aspx – it has been recently updated.

As I mentioned at the meeting, I also recommend a book titled Professional Microsoft Search: FAST Search, SharePoint Search, and Search Server by Mark Bennett, Jeff Fried, Miles Kehoe and Natalya Voskresenskaya. It is a great resource on planning and architecture of SharePoint Enterprise Search, and specifically FAST Search products.

Last but not least is a reference to Steve Peschka’s blog post where Steve introduces a Search Explorer tool that he wrote. Steve’s blog is an essential resource on developing Search and other SharePoint development topics.

So I’d like to re-cap on a few questions we left unanswered yesterday:

1. FAST visual best bets were displayed, but did not get filtered based on User Context’s managed properties. The question is how to create/promote properties into user context for such filtering to happen correctly. UPDATE: I figured this one out

2. I was not lucky extending CoreResultsWebPart and make it process custom FQL queries, and was forced instead to write a web part from scratch. The question is whether there is a supported way to extend CoreResultsWebPart for FAST search queries.
UPDATE: this one is now also addressed. Check it out here.

3. Somebody has mentioned that they could not get PowerPoint visual preview to work with FAST search results, suspecting that SSL encryption between FAST Search Server and query SSA was to blame. Looks like some research is needed here.

I plan to look into these and post my findings. Please feel free to comment on if you get answers sooner.