Hello from the final session from Day 2 of the SharePoint Conference 2009! For this session, we are talking about search relevance. First off, defining the quality of a search results in how relevant the results are to the user's query. Two enterprise-level search products are available from Microsoft: SharePoint Server 2010 and FAST. FAST implements more visual and contextualized Best Bets.
The ideal is to provide a conversational user experience that helps the user achieve fast and high-quality task completion. When running the query, analyze and drill-down into the result set and adapting it based on the user interaction.
SharePoint 2010 allows users to browse through the multiple slides in a PowerPoint file to investigate if it is useful to their task without requiring them to open it. As well as the ability to refine their result set through sorting categories along the left such as result type, author, site, etc.
Contextual Promotions is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 which utilize Best Bets, Visual Best Bets, Site Promotions. By taking advantage of the properties in the user profile such as Title, Function, or Department, Contextual Promotions is able to build a result set that is most relevant to the user. For example. Someone who is a sales manager verses a developer would have interests in different types of files. It's great to see this level of intelligence configurable to search!
Applying refiners to Results page is done through a Web Part with further customizations done by editing the XML. There are additional configurations that can be customized through development tools, however, the web part and XML allows a great deal of capability without requiring code. Yay!
Top 10 Data Organizational Tips
10. Avoid mixing multilingual metadata, text and message files.
9. Annotate text regions with their language
8. Group by language where possible, then by subject
7. Encourage natural hierarchies
6. Use natural language for metadata
5. Supply copious metadata such as author, dates, titles, and tags
4. Encourage population of My Sites and Profiles - it helps people search
3. Encourage application social tags
2. Reserve areas for your premium content - ensure it is hosted on reliable fast servers.
1. Encourage archiving obsolete data
That wraps-up today, but tune in for more tomorrow. On my agenda is content types (my favorite topic) and Excel Services in SharePoint 2010.
Cheers,
Sandra Tersteeg
Technology Business Consultant
Allyis, Inc | www.allyis.com