Service Pack 2 Update. The public update for the Service Pack 2 expiration date issue<http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx> is now available for download. Whoo-hoo, I hope that you caught this one! The update can be applied before or after Service Pack 2 installation. If the update is applied prior to installing Service Pack 2 it will prevent the expiration date from being improperly activated during installation of ... Read Full Story
Interesting fact was uncovered during our enterprise deployment project, and I wanted to share it. The client has Oracle SAP that they are using across the globe, and we were supplementing user profile properties that have very limited information in AD through BDC to Oracle. Import through BDC was very slow, I mean VERY slow. If AD full import was taking 1 1/2 hour to import 70,000 user profiles, then BDC part would take around 20+ hours. with this numbers, there was no way for us to meet S... Read Full Story
Real bummer. I had to power off my server that was running Hyper-v and the whole bunch of VMs. Until I get the hyper-v host back, I decided to continue my development on one of the machines by converting it into vmware. The general VMware converter that allows you to convert from VHD is not working with POWERED OFF hyper-v VHD. apparently you can convert it only as a physical machine by giving the IP address, which in my case is not possible as I do not have another Hyper-v host. I guess I ha... Read Full Story
Never noticed it before, but after checking it on several installations of MOSS, it appears that the search is “ignoring” “start Date” on publishing pages and includes all documents that had not been published yet. If you create for example an article and set publish date one week from now, you have to modify your search not to include these articles into search results until this date had been reached. Read Full Story
It is a short notice, but I urge you to attend this meeting. Jim Kane will present on "Challenges and SharePoint Enterprise Deployments (& a few solutions)" This presentation will focus on the many and varied challenges of implementing SharePoint on an enterprise level, whether for a small company or for a large company. Enterprise deployments present unique issues; from expectations through politics, from infrastructure decisions through going out-of-the-box or customizing... Read Full Story
The installation is not that cumbersome, but the trick here is to install the right prerequisites especially java JDK(Java SE Development Kit with JavaFX (JDK 6u13 / FX 1.1)), you can find it at http://java.sun.com If you do not have the right version of JDK, your installation will fail on Windows ( never done it in other OS), unfortunately you can’t really find it in documentation, so you can spend sometime struggling with it. One of the great features of the FAST installer is that once in... Read Full Story
Each “content source” is represented as a “Collection” within FAST ESP. Data is being fed into Document Processing Pipelines for refinement through the use of “Connectors” that are defined for a specific collection. There are three types of connectors for FAST search engine: FAST OOTB connectors Third Party (proprietary) connectors Custom connectors, using FAST API YES! FAST allows you to go against APIs FAST OOTB connectors Enterprise Crawler: used to feed conten... Read Full Story
The right way to introduce FAST would be to give an overview of how the indexing and search is really done and what processes take place. I’m sure it’s not the best graphic you have ever seen, but I’m not a designer for a reason. This picture provides a VERY simplified overview of processes, but it is a start. FAST terminology: document is not a Microsoft Word document per-say (even thought it can be), document is data entity t... Read Full Story
So what is all the fuss about? Why do we even want to consider FAST as a search engine? What FAST does that other search engines fail to do and why? As we all remember in early 2000 it was all about data, collecting data, “information is the power”. Almost all companies jumped on “Data collection” wagon. Few years later they were forced to collect data in the light of all laws and regulations that were imposed by government. At around the same time and even earlier wave of data analysi... Read Full Story
In this post I’d like to introduce you to FAST ESP dictionaries and their benefits. FAST ESP (Enterprise Search Platform) has many prebuilt dictionaries. Dictionaries that support basic entity extraction such as: locations, people names, and company names. Dictionaries that help to facilitate a context recognition through the use of lemmatization, synonyms, spelling variations, stop words elimination, etc… Lemmatization: generally speaking, lemmatization means the mapping of a word to it... Read Full Story
