Today I performed my first ‘Official’ Microsoft presentation at the TechNet briefing event in Newcastle.  I got to present on the same stage as seasoned presenters James O’Neill, Steve Lamb and new Evangelist team member Andrew Fryer.  

I got an email on the 27th Nov (along with other MOSS MVPs) asking if there was anyone who could cover a session on the newly released Microsoft Search Server 2008 to 100+ people!   After a small hesitation and some juggling with work commitments I raised my proverbial hand and I was in…  Luckily I had attended TechEd in Barcelona where Ryan Deguid had announced the product only 14 days earlier and had taken the time to install and play with the features,  see previous post from TechEd).   A few emails later and a ‘semi’ interview with Viral Tarpara to ensure I was ‘on message’ and I had a slide deck and a rough agenda.  Georgina and Sarah were fantastic in sorting everything for me including obligatory TechNet T-Shirt.

Monday evening involved a long train ride from Telford to Newcastle,  I have to apologies to anyone sitting near me as I took the opportunity to work through the slides;  a technique I have found very useful for this is to record myself using Camtasia and play back to myself to see how it sounds – it amazing how quickly you can improve you flow and presentation story in just a few takes.

I made the hotel before the bar closed and met up with Georgina, James, Steve and Andrew.   My slot was the second of the morning so enough time to get warmed up but also allow the pre-match nerves to build,  this was my first 100+ audience after all.

Enterprise Search from Microsoft

my name is Andrew Woodward, I am a SharePoint MVP and I feel Greeeaaat!

my opening line was a reference to this MVP parody You Tube video that makes me laugh today.  For all those who attended and looked at me like I had lost the plot – now you know 

A great tip I had from someone after one of my early suguk presentations,  make sure you have the first 5 minutes in your head so you can start with confidence.   This helps you with the presentation but also gets the audience on side.

A summary of the content below,  the slide deck is available and videos will be available soon.  For those that missed it and watch the video you will see Viral back in action for the session in London and Reading.

• Version differences between Search Server 2008 (MSS) and Search Server 2008 Express (MSSX)  – or lack of them!
• How does MSS fit into the MOSS release schedule
  • MOSS and WSS SP1
  • MSS RTM
  • MSS Update Patch for MOSS
  • MSS rolled into MOSS SP2
• What’s needed to run MSSX
• Ease of Installation
  • ~20 mins to install and 10 clicks
  • Serving results in ~35minutes
  • You can do this over lunch!
• Upgrades, the supported and unsupported paths
• Consolidated Administration interface
• Federation
  • See below as this is really cool!   You need this
• Ending with a demo
  • We even opened up Visual Notepad and presented some C# code to an ITPro crowd – now that doesn’t happen every day   

Federation

Direct quote from the slides, and answered exactly by the knowledgeable audience.

“Federation enables the display of results from other search engines or application to be displayed alongside local results”

You no longer need to try and crawl and index all of the content you want to search,  you can leverage the search capabilities of the existing applications like Live.com and present these to the end user.   Federation is achieved through the implementation of Federation Definition Location (*.FLD) files which define how the application can be searched using the the OpenSearch syntax.  for example on Live.com this could be

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}

The calling of and display of the results are managed via two web parts, each of which expect the results of the query to be returned in XML format,  more specifically the out of the box XSLT is setup to work with RSS format XML.  The Federation Results Web part  displays the results from a single FDL and the Top Federated Results Web Part displays the content based on multiple FLDs, based on an order of preference.

Authentication has been covered in detail and allows federation using anonymous,  common (shared) or user.   Note, if you intend to use User based authentication you will need to roll your own code,   samples are expected at RTM.

So what does this mean to you?

You need to download the software from http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch deploy this in your environment and see how it works.  There are still opportunities to have an impact on the RTM product so if you have any ideas/bugs please post them here and I will forward them to the channels within Microsoft.

Questions from the Day

Q. MSSX and Small Business Server – do they work together?   

A.  Under investigation,  you can help here http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2391132&SiteID=17

Q. Will the Federated web parts work without an Internet connection if the federation is to the Local Search Results?

A. Yes,  Local Search Results Federation will work without an Internet connection.

Q. Accessibility – WSS is known to fall down on Accessibility,  will MSS/MSSX be accessible?

A. Not out of the box, but! – This is not a MSS problem specifically but more an issue with the WSS platform on which it is built.   Microsoft have released the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint V1, and the timeline for AKS 1.1 to address some of the collaboration accessibility should mean this will be available to be implemented with MSS.   So with some work on the master page and implementation of the AKS you should be able to provide an Accessible Search Server 2008 solution.

Q. Can I run MSSX on the Internet?

A. Yes, if you have the Windows Connector licence that enables WSS to run on the Internet this would be the same for MSSX with SQL Express. If you have full SQL you will also need get the Per Processor licenses for this as well.

I would like to thank everyone who attended and hope you got what you expected from the session,  I certainly did