This workshop situates search, especially simple full-text search, within information management, identifying strengths and best use in enterprise search, intranets, portals and ecommerce, and large informational websites. A practical overview, this workshop has a focused introduction to search technology and user experience. Elements of search covered include robot spiders, database connectors and other tools for locating content, indexing issues, query parsing, retrieval, relevance ranking, and designing usable search interfaces. The workshop addresses common search problems and solutions, security issues, languages, new interface elements, and new technology, such as near-real-time search and multimedia search.

The coming year is going to be an important transition year for SharePoint search managers as they seek to get the best out of their MOSS07 application and take a view on a migration to SharePoint 2010. This workshop will take a practical viewpoint on how to get the best from current SharePoint search implementations, outline third-party options available, and highlight the issues that need to be considered in assessing the upgrade road map. Technical and governance issues will be considered and participants will be encouraged to exchange their own experience in searching SharePoint.

Text analytics (categorization, entity extraction, and sentiment analysis) is becoming an essential part of search as an enterprise platform for information applications, along with taxonomies and a rich set of metadata facets. However, there are a wide range of issues that must be solved in order to produce a well-integrated solution. The payoff for putting resources into this complex task, however, literally can save organizations millions of dollars a year. Attendees will be taken through the process of creating a text analytics-search platform—from how to select the right software to required resources, taxonomy, and categorization development. The workshop will include a series of hands-on exercises in which participants will explore how to develop rules and refine them.We will end with a discussion of how your new taxonomy-categorization catalog can be integrated with
enterprise search and how it can be a foundation for integrating search into a wide range of applications.

This workshop will cover the steps necessary to tune SharePoint 2010 for search using FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010, starting with a fresh installation. In addition to setting up simple search for a small website, this workshop will focus on the steps required to use the expanded capabilities of FAST ESP in a variety of environments. Topics to be covered include quick start; advanced content indexing (web/database/file shares); customizing search results with and without web parts; faceted search; query tuning; managing search; social search; search profiles; integration; secure search; federation; and more. Attendees will come to understand the unique benefits of FAST ESP search, how to configure and manage search in production environments, and how to scale ESP as content expands to the enterprise level. Learn from the authors of the book Professional Microsoft FAST Search: Customizing, Designing, and Deploying Search for SharePoint 2010 and Internet Servers.