The time has come that me and many other SharePointers have anxiously been looking forward to; The SharePoint 2009 conference in Las Vegas where we will learn about all the new goodies SharePoint 2010 has to offer. I am here together with about 230 fellow Danes! The conference will altogether accommodate about 7000 attendees!! This is a very impressive figure that shows just how much momentum SharePoint has gained.
This morning (after a tasty but unhealthy breakfast buffet at the Luxor) I went to register myself for the conference and to get the SWAG. I have to admit that I was a little disappointed that it did not include a new cool SharePoint 2010 bag and a t-shirt with the new SharePoint logo on it. The best item in the SWAG is a 250 page book with technical details about all the improvements in SharePoint 2010. I have studied it and will in a moment share some of its content here.
There is a lot of new stuff in SharePoint 2010 – too much for me to cover it all here. Hence I will stick to my favorite topic here, namely SharePoint Search. My plan is to try and cover the news on Search starting today with the stuff I have just learned from the book. Then the next four days offers a god deal of sessions on SharePoint Search and I will publish technical details from these on a daily basis. The conference offers about 230 different sessions across all SP2010 topics where 13 of them are specific to Enterprise Search.
New and Improved Features in SharePoint Server 2010 Search
Here is the news I got so far from studying the book handed out to all conference attendees.
- Improved user experience.
- Improved relevance ranking.
- Faceted search. The search user experience now includes this concept available in MOSS 2007 via the free faceted search Web part on CodePlex.
- Improved people search with support for Wildcard search and phonetic name search. Faceted search is also available here.
- Improved Search based on Social Behavior. Support for social tagging and rating of content, which will influence relevance. Another cool thing is that SharePoint tracks the Click-through rate on results to detect popular results. This information is in turn used to adapt and improve the relevance score from user behavior.
- Re-architected Search Architecture. SP2010 includes a new Query architecture and a new Crawling architecture supporting greater redundancy and improvements to scaling up and out. The biggest change is the introduction of index partitions allowing a huge index to spread across multiple query servers. Hence, SP2010 now scales to about 100 million documents compared to 50 million in SharePoint 2007.
- Improved development experience. Improved APIs and tools allowing developers to extend search and build applications on it.
This list is by no means the complete list of improvements to SP2010 search – we will for sure learn more during the next four days. Also, please note that the news above applies to the standard search engine that ships with SharePoint 2010 – they do not apply to the FAST Enterprise Search engine. The book does not say much FAST other then there will be a new product named FAST Search for SharePoint. It will provide a more conversational and visual user experience including document previews and a more advanced faceted search component capable of delivering deep refinements with exact counts,
Sessions that I Plan to Attend
- Monday 19/10: Enterprise Search Overview
- Tuesday 20/10: SharePoint Server 2010 Search: Capabilities Deep Dive, FAST Search for SharePoint: Capabilities Deep Dive, Deploying FAST Search for SharePoint, Search Relevance and Relevance Tuning
- Wednesday 21/10: A Tour of Great Enterprise Search Applications, Overview of Content Acquisition for Search in SharePoint 2010, Solving Information Chaos: Advanced Content Processing with FAST Search for SharePoint, Social Search in SharePoint 2010
- Thursday 22/10: Customizing Search in SharePoint: Building Great Sites with Search
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SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Search, Conference