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My name is Dan Blood, I am a senior tester working in the product group that is responsible for Search within MOSS and MSS. One of my responsibilities is maintaining a mirror, SearchBeta, of the enterprise search solution that all of Microsoft uses. This mirror indexes approximately 28 million documents on the corporate intranet as well as serving all of the echoed queries that are executed against the main enterprise search system. This mirror has virtually the same query load and data as Microsoft's enterprise portal. The product group routinely uses this mirror to validate QFEs, potential fixes as well as validate and observe how the system behaves at scale. This mirror has been up and running for several months now and I along with the team have learned a lot from the experience.
My intent for this series of blog postings is to provide details on the lessons that we have learned. For example:
- What have I done to optimize the hardware?
- What can be done with the crawling system to ensure the 28+ million documents are "freshly" indexed?
- How has the SQL machine been configured for optimal use?
- How do I monitor the system to make sure it is healthy?
Over the next few weeks I'll be updating the blog with the above information. If you have questions around how to maintain a large scale enterprise search deployment feel free to post your questions as comments to this post and I'll try to answer your questions in follow-up postings.
Thank you for your interest and comments. Check back in the next few days for the first post in this series.
Dan Blood
Senior Tester
Microsoft Corp
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Well, it has been a while since I last posted – but for good reason. Aside from our usual day-to-day efforts to deliver great enterprise search solutions for our customers, we’ve also been feverishly working on the acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer that we originally announced on January 8. Today, I’m excited to share that the tender offer is complete!
As I mentioned in January, FAST has an incredibly talented team of folks who bring great customer focus and tremendous expertise in the category – more than 60% of their people are engineers and close to 50 of them have PhDs in relevant fields. One of their true visionaries, John Markus Lervik, who has been FAST CEO, will transition to become Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Search. John’s leadership will have an immediate impact on the development across our comprehensive portfolio of enterprise search offerings – including Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express , search for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and FAST ESP – and will result in the future delivery of a single enterprise search platform. I’m thrilled to welcome our new team members on board and am eager for them to get started!
By bringing together our two companies, customers will no longer have to compromise when evaluating the enterprise search solution that’s best for them. We can now meet all their needs no matter how basic or complex: Search Server Express available as a free download; SharePoint offers search integrated with other business productivity tools; and for those with highly sophisticated needs, FAST ESP provides best-in-class capabilities for the most demanding search applications in both internal and customer-facing scenarios. And, you can be assured that with our expanded team in place, we’ll be in an even better position to continue innovation across all three products, including FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX.
Speaking of Linux and UNIX, some people may be (mis)interpreting our continued support and investment in these platforms as a broader change for Microsoft – so here’s some color. We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice.
Net, our approach doesn’t imply any kind of broader change for our company in its strategy (so conspiracy theorists can stand down J) and you shouldn’t expect to see SharePoint running on UNIX. We’re making a business decision for enterprise search and feel great about what it means for our FAST search customers.
Getting to this point has been quite a journey, but the most exciting part about it for me is that we are only just getting started. Whether it’s ensuring customers continue to get great service from the people and support teams they know or building on the span of our product portfolio, I’m confident that the combination of Microsoft and FAST will serve customers’ needs more broadly and help make enterprise search become a truly ubiquitous tool that is central to how workers find and use information.
I look forward to sharing more with you as the journey continues.
Kirk Koenigsbauer
General Manager
SharePoint Business Group
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If you're working with searching Lotus Notes with SharePoint Server 2007 or Search Server 2008, you may have hit one of the following problems:
"You configure SharePoint Server 2007 to crawl a Lotus Notes content source. In the Manage Content Sources page, you add a new content source by specifying a database name. When you edit the newly created content source, the database name is not listed in the Database Name list."
"You configure SharePoint Server 2007 to crawl a Lotus Notes content source. You first perform a full crawl for the content source. However, when you click Edit content source for the content source, and then you click OK, you have to perform a full crawl again before you can search the content source. This behavior occurs even if you did not change any settings for the content source."
Although a work around is possible by using administration tools like SharePoint Search Admin (http://www.codeplex.com/searchadmin) we recently released a hotfix to fix the issues – KB950280 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950280 ), it also solves several other bugs including a fix for the German wordbreaker - if you have problems searching compound words like “Riesentorte” and “Baumgarten”, this hotfix should solve the problem.
Remember, if you have not applied Service Pack 1 on SharePoint Server 2007, please apply it before you install this hotfix. There’s no SP1 requirement for Search Server 2008.
Jie Li
Partner Technology Specialist
Microsoft China
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Search Server 2008 Express has only been available for a month now, and we have already been hearing stories from customers about how it has helped them deliver value to their organization -- in many cases in unexpected ways that became a great hero opportunity for IT. We would really like to share your stories on our website to help others understand how search can help them...
Have you used Search Server Express to change the way your organization uses search to find information? Can your co-workers uncover the information they need on the company intranet faster than before? Do your customers now locate products and services from public facing websites quickly and easily? If so, tell us your story!
Visit here to briefly tell us how and why you implemented Search Server Express at your organization as well as the feedback you received from your co-workers and customers. Partners, you can submit your customer stories here as well, and we will include your name in the entries. We will post selected stories on the www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch website this month!
Rhett Dillingham
Senior Product Manager
Microsoft Corp
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Are you trying to think of ways to make your Search Server site more interactive and graphical? You can use Federation as a way to enhance the functionality of your search result pages.
The Federated Search Web Part makes it possible to display more than results from OpenSearch (1.0/1.1) sites on your search results page. The Search Server 2008 SDK explains how to include results from SQL Server database queries and search sites that do not expose XML feeds (such as Atom or RSS). In both scenarios, you do this by means of a "connector," a light-weight interface that sends queries to a given location or database, places the results into a structured XML document, and sends that XML to a Federated Search Web Part.
This sample demonstrates how you can extend the connector concept to Web service requests other than basic search queries. It shows how to use a connector to pass an address string to Microsoft's MapPoint Web service in order to obtain the latitude and longitude coordinates for that address. Once you have those coordinates, displaying a Microsoft Virtual Earth map requires only the addition of some Javascript to your Federated Location definition file. See this Codeplex project for the sample code (along with a sample Federated location definition file) and an explanation of how to implement it on your own site.
This sample is part of the Search Community Toolkit
Jim Crowley
Programming Writer
Microsoft Corp
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