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Posts Tagged ‘FAST’

Automation Testing – What to Expect and What Not to Expect

Myth 1: Automation replaces Manual Testers. Reality: After the scripts are developed, the common misconception is that we can replace the manual testers with Automation, but this is not true. Automation is a program which will test the flow of the system. Even a small defect can be missed if we don’t write scripts to look for […]

SharePoint 2013 Search Part 5 – Search-based Solutions

Working with clients I am always keen to bring the conversation about search forward in our discussion of a solution. Search is not something we ‘plug in’ or ‘turn on’ in the later stages of a SharePoint project. Search needs to be considered from the outset and built into the architecture if we are to […]

SharePoint 2013 Search Part 4 – Search Result Customization

If you have ever worked with customizing search results in SharePoint you will be familiar with the need to write XSLT. I was always somewhat of a reluctant XSLT developer, I was able to achieve some interesting customizations but they did not come without some pain and the feeling that there must be a better […]

SharePoint 2013 Search Part 3 – User Experience and WebParts

Microsoft has really targeted the user experience in 2013 Search and there are a whole host of improvements which will I think impress our users. They include: We can now see search results as we type into the search box. We have some very nice visual refinement available like the new Date Slider. Creating date […]

SharePoint 2013 Search Part 2 – Richer Query Language

I was a little disappointed with some aspects of how FAST was bolted on to SharePoint 2010. We had a fantastic new search engine but its capabilities were throttled by the depth of integration with SharePoint. One aspect of this was access to the power of the FAST Query Language (FQL). FQL is a rich […]

SharePoint 2013 Search Part 1 – What happened to FAST?

We have now had a few months to try out SharePoint 2013 Preview and things are looking really exciting for Search. In this 5-part series of blog posts I will review the upgrade in technology, highlight some new features which I think are important and show how they relate to real-world scenarios. In SharePoint 2010 […]

Debugging your FAST Search Server: Document Processing Pipeline

For an example of the processing pipeline itself, check out Jeff Monnette’s blog here. The FAST Processing Pipeline is a great method of feeding in your own Crawled Properties into FAST, and then being able to expose those properties by mapping to managed properties and searching on them. We ran into a situation with some […]

Dealing with Single and Multi-Value Crawled Properties (FAST for SharePoint)

We were having some issues dealing with single and multi-value fields in SharePoint and how FAST interprets them for the index. The distinction between them is actually quite important and can have an impact when it comes down to refining your search results. In our example, we were dealing with a multi-value site column lookup […]

FAST for SharePoint 2010 Non-Admin node configuration

I spent considerable time last week trying to build 2-node FAST for SharePoint 2010 implementation. Creating the setup.xml file and building the admin FAST node was the easy part, but trying to connect the non-admin node is what took up most of my time. (The default FAST installation creates 3 example files under C:FASTSearchetc directory, […]

FASTSearchCert.pfx Expired? Don’t Fret and Make Your Certificate Last!

So everything was hunky-dory in the FAST world. User Contexts and Site Promotions were getting along, scopes did their thing, and life crawled along. Your Content SSA chugs along and suddenly… A year after the original FAST installation took place, the unthinkable (well, unexpected and forgotten) happened. The self-signed FASTSearchCert.pfx certificate expired! If you have […]

Using FQL to query FAST Search Index

In SharePoint 2010, you can use FAST Query Language (FQL) to query the FAST Search Server content index. In this blog, I will show how you can use the Query Web Service and the KeywordQuery class to execute an FQL query against the content index. You need to ensure the following has been completed, before […]

FAST for SharePoint 2010, Lessons Learned

We just did a FAST for SharePoint 2010 install & configuration at a client yesterday. The client had multiple servers; one admin and two non-admin servers. Great documentation is provided on TechNet, and really should be the outline that you use: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381267.aspx Make sure you pay attention to the hardware/software requirements; Windows Firewall needs to […]

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