Lessons learned and MSIT best practices (Enterprise search at Microsoft, white paper)

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Summary: Learn what best practices Microsoft IT used when it upgraded the Microsoft enterprise search solution to FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.

Applies to: Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

This is the eleventh of 12 articles that compose How Microsoft IT deployed FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (white paper).

In comparison to a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 search solution, MSIT found that it takes additional hardware, skills, and people to plan, deploy, operate, and support a large deployment such as the MSIT search solution that uses Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. Accordingly, MSIT followed these best practices to avoid issues and keep the environment available and performing well:

  • Plan and design the search architecture carefully. MSIT considered many factors when planning its FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint solution. This included the location and amount of content to be crawled, the number of users, the anticipated query load, user requirements for results freshness, requirements for search availability, and the expected growth in the amount of content and number of user queries in connection with the anticipated longevity of the farm. Understanding these factors helped MSIT determine the number of physical and logical components that the new farm required. Certain aspects of a FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint farm cannot be easily changed after the initial deployment, so it was important to plan carefully to avoid having to deploy the farm again if the initial design was not viable or optimal.

    For more information, see the following articles:

  • Plan content types and managed properties. MSIT had to rapidly deploy FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint to production at Microsoft due to a requirement to test the software before it was released to the public. Therefore, MSIT did not have time to plan all content types and managed properties before it deployed the search service, and it had to create some content types and managed properties after the deployment was in operation. In some cases, site owners then had to adjust search refiners or rank profiles to accommodate changes in content types and managed properties. In addition, end users had to make adjustments in the way they used search. For example, when a managed property changed, a user might not be able to use it in searches anymore, or might get different results by using it. This experience confirmed to MSIT that it is best to plan and create content types and managed properties before an organization deploys a search solution. This enables site owners to create and configure more permanent search refiners and rank profiles at the beginning of a deployment, and it results in a more consistent search experience for users.

  • Automate search configuration changes. MSIT automates search configuration changes whenever possible by using Windows PowerShell. Automation of changes, such as addition of managed properties to the system, saves time and provides uniformity in the change process. This helps MSIT ensure that it makes changes in similar ways each time.

  • Provide governance policies for search configuration changes. MSIT receives many requests for changes to the search configuration, such as requests for new managed properties. Without governance policies, change processes in such a large deployment could quickly become unmanageable. Therefore, MSIT enforces governance policies for certain configuration changes, which provides order and helps in change tracking.

  • Integrate with other SharePoint services. To maximize the benefits of using FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, MSIT invested resources in configuring and using other SharePoint services on which search has dependencies. For example, the search service has the following dependencies:

    • User Profile service and My Sites for results for people searches

    • Managed Metadata service for managed properties that can be used for refiners, ranked results, custom full-text indexes, and property queries

    • Microsoft Business Connectivity Services for the operation of connectors to crawl repositories of structured data

    Investing in these other areas helped MSIT create richer search experiences and improve information discovery.

    For information about deploying and operating these other services, see the following articles:

  • Gather user feedback. User feedback is invaluable to MSIT for understanding user problems and improving the enterprise search system. For more information, see Monitoring search, earlier in this series of articles.

To view the white paper as a single article on TechNet, or to download it, see Improving enterprise search at Microsoft: How FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Powers Worldwide Intranet Search at Microsoft (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb735129.aspx).