SharePoint Tip of the Month

May 2011: FAST - Exponentially Advanced SharePoint ECM

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a core function of SharePoint 2010, tightly integrated to the platform through the use of the managed metadata service, enterprise search sites, content rating, document IDs and the ability for users to uniquely and individually tag content. Those that seek to move beyond these capabilities and take their ECM initiative to the next level are implementing FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint for its increased capabilities over SharePoint 2010’s out-of-the-box search.

As the search engine has become the primary way users find information on the web, they are easily frustrated when the same level of search magic isn’t provided in their organization. Users frequently share that while they can easily find content on the web in almost any language, format and viewpoint, they are confounded as to why they can’t find content that they or their coworkers have created within their own corporate network. Users have come to expect magic when they search for content within their organization’s information systems but often the experience frustrates, confuses and promotes poor ECM practices when it comes to corporate information users maintain on their workstation’s local drive or a secured team folder on a file share. Given that most internet-based search engines provide almost magical results, such as showing exactly the content a user seeks within the first 5-8 query responses, the question that we need to ask ourselves is, how can we do search in a way that it becomes part of an overall ECM initiative rather than an adjunct to one?

It’s important to note that within the context of an ECM initiative when your users search your enterprise knowledgebase they are seeking knowledge, not simply a specific document. This means that your users are searching for people that are experts in a particular field, documents that match their search criteria and any other information that can be found about the topic at hand.

Once Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint is implemented in a SharePoint environment it takes over the search duties for the SharePoint instance but adds a large number of enhanced capabilities that simply aren’t available with even the Enterprise version of SharePoint 2010.

1. FAST provides users with a thumbnail preview of documents so they can quickly determine if a result matches what they seek. As an example, imagine a user searching for a press release about a particular topic and they know what the common format for a press release looks like. Using FAST, they simply search for a term contained in the press release and, once results are returned, they are able to see each search result as a thumbnail preview within their search results. If they find a document that they wish to investigate further they can click on the thumbnail and, without actually opening the document, see a larger preview to confirm that it’s the document they want. This greatly decreases the amount of time it takes to find the right information because they can either quickly consume the content or rebuild their search to be more specific. This thumbnail preview also allows users to do something that’s vastly undervalued: stumble across content that matches their search criteria. The act of stumbling across content has several positive effects, not the least of which is providing additional context to a topic.

 

2. FAST Refiners allow the user to filter search results after the user’s search term has returned results. Refiners allow users to drill further into search results by using clickable links on the side of the search results page to filter the search results. These filters might include author, date ranges, location and even metadata that has previously been applied to the content. Also, there are two configurable types of refiners, deep and shallow. The use of deep refinement will allow your searcher to affect the aggregate results of a search, refining all of the content that responded to the search query term that was used. Shallow refiners focus only on the top 100 results in a particular search query, providing fast access to the content that most closely matches the request by the searcher.

 

3. FAST for SharePoint 2010 provides Visual Best Bets, allowing images to be set to respond to a particular search term. By adding a keyword in SharePoint’s site collection administration, you can provide an image that will appear within the FAST search results at the top of the page so that people are made aware of information that relates to their query. This is useful when you want to provide a graph or chart when individuals search on ‘quarterly revenue.’ Within the FAST Search keyword setup you can also set a start and end date that controls when a visual best bet shows so that users will only see the graphic in the results during a specific time. This is beneficial when you want to highlight information, such as a graphic being used to inform people about benefits open enrollment, showing a picture of the resort where the corporate retreat will be held or provide pictures of your corporate locations. You can also apply a user context to the visual best bet to allow a focused group of people to see a specific visual indicator while users outside of the group do not.

 

4. FAST provides the ability to index extremely large amounts of content as well as provides add-on modules that allow the indexing system to crawl numerous non-SharePoint content sources, such as content stored within external web sites, network file shares, user profile information, Lotus Notes databases and line of business applications. Additionally, FAST Federated Search Connectors provide federated searches against non-FAST indexes for sites such as Bing News, Business Week, Flickr, YouTube, TechNet, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, MSDN and others. These capabilities can be used to provide search results of SharePoint content alongside of information that is coming directly from an external news site to provide deeper analysis of a topic as well as the most up-to-date news on the topic side-by-side in the search results page. Imagine a competitive analysis site that utilizes FAST to consolidate information from across multiple internet-based web sites as well as with the information that is stored on your internal systems. Providing a ‘one-stop-shop’ for relevant content around a particular topic is what users have come to expect from a modern search engine. Now the ability to combine external results alongside internal content makes the user community much more efficient. Get more information on the Federated Search Connectors here.

 

5. Many organizations are often very interested in FAST’s ability to extract metadata from indexed content based on a pre-defined data dictionary and then, once extracted, apply the metadata to a column or field within a SharePoint library. While the SharePoint 2010 managed metadata service allows administrators to provide a common taxonomy regarding content classification, we find ourselves relying on user community to apply those tags to the content that they store in SharePoint. FAST recognizes People, Places, Company Names, Titles, Projects and any other item that you wish FAST to search for within the documents it indexes. And what about the content that can be indexed by FAST that isn’t stored on SharePoint? That content would not be profiled in the first place given that it’s not stored on the SharePoint environment. The ability for FAST to aid in the profile of content greatly enhances the relevancy ranking for the content as users search for information and aids in the ranking and presentation of refiners used to navigate through search results. Given that, in most environments, users truly dislike adding metadata to content at the point of save, FAST’s ability to extract metadata significantly enhances the ECM efforts of your organization. Watch a short video about FAST’s ability to extract metadata from SharePoint content here.

 

6. The FAST Query Language (FQL) allows for fuzzy searches to occur against content, such as when you are interested in performing searches with boundaries such as word proximity (‘look for words a defined distance from one another’), lemmatization (‘search for inflected forms of a word, such as he/his/hers/her/him’) and the ability to define rules that affect the relevance within a particular search (‘show me my search results with the content that has been most frequently clicked on by the user community’). FQL is not an end-user facing part of FAST, but rather is available to developers and other IT professionals when creating search applications for the end user community to use. This can be helpful when, for example, your users frequently perform searches on legal cases (search for ‘Taylor’ and ‘Rhodes’ where the words are within 3 words of one another) and for situations that call for the most popular results (measured by click-through) to be highlighted so that popularity can be considered by the searcher.

 

7. Query Suggestions assists users to find relevant content by suggesting terms that are likely to return more relevant results. Query Suggestions have grown more popular on internet-based search engines and users find them to be a great benefit as they search for content. Query Suggestions are presented as you begin typing a word or phrase into a search box and a drop down box appears below the search box with a suggested for a completed word or phrase. The user can then click on the suggestion to initiate the search, which likely has a higher degree of relevancy than if they had completed the phrase themselves. In FAST, the administrative team can easily add terms to the FAST Query Service Application that will act as suggestions to your users. This is useful as employees search for co-workers, as people seek information about topics that they may not know a lot about and for highly technical environments where users are searching on chemical names, manufacturing processes, medical terminology or any other environment where searchers can use a helping hand to find the content they seek.

 

8. Custom search capabilities in FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint allow search results to be returned uniquely for a specific person or role. This allows an individual in HR and one in Operations to see two different sets of search results, complete with unique ranking and relevance settings, when they perform a search using the same search term. These roles are defined by the search administrator and, while they dramatically increase the results for a particular group within your organization, require search administration maintenance and upkeep.

FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint makes your SharePoint-based content respond to search queries in a more granular manner, assists in integrating external data source content alongside internal search results, can assist in the automated application of metadata by extracting values directly from the document’s content and allows for the search results to include a thumbnail preview of the document so that users can more easily determine whether it matches the content they seek. There are many more benefits for an environment using FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, but these are, in my estimation, the primary benefits for an organization that is attempting to enhance their Enterprise Content Management efforts on the SharePoint 2010 platform.

This month’s tip contributed By Lee Reed, Director, SharePoint Strategy for Abel Solutions.