European SharePoint Conference Copenhagen 2013 – Enterprise Search

I have finally got round to blogging about the European SharePoint conference. I would have liked to have given the excuse that it has taken this long due my hands still needing time to defrost from the Scandinavian chill but work and life have been on fast forward til now. Ok, enough of me rabbiting on, here is some feedback from the conference and in particular Enterprise Search.

As you may well know, SharePoint 2013 now fully integrates FAST Search for SharePoint into the main product as a service application (so no separate install). Below are some key points about SP2013 search from the Enterprise Search workshop I attended that was run by Agnes Molnar.

• Fast Search now fully integrated as a service application
• Deep refiners are not switched on by default, they have to be enabled.
• A new hover button is available in your search results (very nice feature)
• Document previews are only available for documents held within SharePoint.
• Document previews not available for PDFs.
• Managed Properties are now opened from the ‘Search Schema’ in your search administration.
• ‘Results Sources’ now replaces ‘Search Scopes’ and ‘Federated Sources’ in search administration.
• You can now create ‘Result Sources’ from managed properties.
• A new feature called ‘Continuous Crawling’ can enable you to crawl your content sources continually. However, this is for SharePoint content sources only.
• The Continuous Crawler component requires resources of at least 6-8 processors.
• You can now delegate search administration to designated users.
• People Search is now fully integrated into the Search application using the Fast search capabilities unlike in SP2010 where it had to use SharePoint Search only to crawl people data.
• Better query rules, one query request returns multiple result sets.
• Document parsing is different than 2010, the crawl component crawls every file in the content source regardless of the document extension. I believe powershell can be used to exclude certain document extensions if needed. This will mean that your ndex will be larger in SharePoint 2013, worth looking out for.

I hope this sheds a little light into the SP 2013 Search Application. Some companies will be some way off migrating to SharePoint 2013 but the more information we are aware of before migrating then the more prepared we will be.

I will have another blog on troubleshooting and the performance of SharePoint Search from the conference which will follow soon.