It’s been around 45 days since the acquisition of FAST Search and Transfer closed and we’re moving quickly to provide interoperability for Microsoft customers between FAST ESP and Microsoft SharePoint Server.
The first deliverables from this work are a set of FAST ESP Search Web Parts for quickly integrating results from FAST ESP into SharePoint Server 2007 and a FAST ESP Search site template.
Using these Web Parts and Site Template SharePoint administrators will be able to quickly and easily build FAST ESP-based search sites inside SharePoint 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate components.
Some of the FAST ESP search capabilities that can be exposed within SharePoint Server 2007 using these Web Parts include:
• Search Box Web Part — Search box for query term submission and includes “did you mean” functionality for query correction
• Result List Web Part — Displays search results and supports sorting, pagination, and navigator-based filtering
• Navigator Web Part — Displays dynamic navigators that profile search results across a set of pre-defined dimensions and allow users to refine the search through navigation clicks
• Breadcrumb Web Part — Displays the search term(s) and list of navigators used to obtain the current result set
The FAST ESP Web parts are designed to be open and extensible, and we’re actively encouraging customers and partners to download them, customize them to align with their branding and extend them to fit their searchand user experience requirements.
Expect the features, functionality and range ofESP Web Parts to grow through contributions from the search developer community as well as further contributions from the FAST & Microsoft Search Team!
It’s been around 45 days since the acquisition of FAST Search and Transfer closed and we’re moving quickly to provide interoperability for Microsoft customers between FAST ESP and Microsoft SharePoint Server.
The first deliverables from this work are a set of FAST ESP Search Web Parts for quickly integrating results from FAST ESP into SharePoint Server 2007 and a FAST ESP Search site template.
Using these Web Parts and Site Template SharePoint administrators will be able to quickly and easily build FAST ESP-based search sites inside SharePoint 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate components.
Some of the FAST ESP search capabilities that can be exposed within SharePoint Server 2007 using these Web Parts include:
• Search Box Web Part — Search box for query term submission and includes “did you mean” functionality for query correction
• Result List Web Part — Displays search results and supports sorting, pagination, and navigator-based filtering
• Navigator Web Part — Displays dynamic navigators that profile search results across a set of pre-defined dimensions and allow users to refine the search through navigation clicks
• Breadcrumb Web Part — Displays the search term(s) and list of navigators used to obtain the current result set
The FAST ESP Web parts are designed to be open and extensible, and we’re actively encouraging customers and partners to download them, customize them to align with their branding and extend them to fit their searchand user experience requirements.
Expect the features, functionality and range ofESP Web Parts to grow through contributions from the search developer community as well as further contributions from the FAST & Microsoft Search Team!
It’s been around 45 days since the acquisition of FAST Search and Transfer closed and we’re moving quickly to provide interoperability for Microsoft customers between FAST ESP and Microsoft SharePoint Server.
The first deliverables from this work are a set of FAST ESP Search Web Parts for quickly integrating results from FAST ESP into SharePoint Server 2007 and a FAST ESP Search site template.
Using these Web Parts and Site Template SharePoint administrators will be able to quickly and easily build FAST ESP-based search sites inside SharePoint 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate components.
Some of the FAST ESP search capabilities that can be exposed within SharePoint Server 2007 using these Web Parts include:
• Search Box Web Part — Search box for query term submission and includes “did you mean” functionality for query correction
• Result List Web Part — Displays search results and supports sorting, pagination, and navigator-based filtering
• Navigator Web Part — Displays dynamic navigators that profile search results across a set of pre-defined dimensions and allow users to refine the search through navigation clicks
• Breadcrumb Web Part — Displays the search term(s) and list of navigators used to obtain the current result set
The FAST ESP Web parts are designed to be open and extensible, and we’re actively encouraging customers and partners to download them, customize them to align with their branding and extend them to fit their searchand user experience requirements.
Expect the features, functionality and range ofESP Web Parts to grow through contributions from the search developer community as well as further contributions from the FAST & Microsoft Search Team!
My name is Paul Learning, a Senior Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services specializing in SharePoint deployments, and it’s with great excitement and pride that I announce the release of the SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper. This 90+ page whitepaper is based on a lot of hard work, dedication, and collaboration from a team of exceptional individuals; it documents the architectural design considerations and performance characteristics of a real-world, large-scale SharePoint lab implementation containing around 50 million content items, and reflects both “scale-up” and “scale-out” scenarios.
The hardware rig was provided by Fujitsu and included blade servers, rack servers, and an Eternus 4000 SAN with 10 TB of storage space. Special thanks to Greg Reuter, Jeff DeCarlo, and Brett Pierce from Fujitsu!
KnowledgeLake, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, was responsible for blasting 50 million content items into SharePoint; they also played a key role in defining the architecture, creating and executing the system tests, and gathering the massive results. KnowlegeLake was ultimately able to use their load tool to send 50 million documents into SharePoint at a peak rate of over 7 million documents per day! Very special thanks to Russ Houberg, Gregg Smith, Bob Bueltmann, Chuck Nash, and Ron Cameron from KnowledgeLake!
Of course, I simply can’t forget to mention all the incredible Microsoft people, who assisted in making this effort a success. First and foremost, our fearless leader, Andy Hopkins, who led the effort from start to finish and constantly amazed me with his enthusiasm and perseverance. I was equally impressed with Andy’s ability to wordsmith while editing our whitepaper. Next comes the long list of other exceptional individuals who stepped up to help out: Steve Peschka, Mike Taghizadeh, Thomas Rizzo, Ryan Duguid, Joel Oleson, Mitch Prince, Doron Bar-Caspi, Simon Skaria, Ambrose Treacy, Sid Shah, Grant Morisette, and Mitch Powers.
I could never have completed this project without the generous help of the people mentioned above. It was truly a collaborative team effort!
In addition to the project that resulted in the Scalability and Performance whitepaper, the KnowledgeLake folks and I were recently involved in another very challenging proof-of-concept for a large pharmaceutical company, which represented a large-scale SharePoint implementation containing 40 TB of content (about 75 million content items) spread across two SharePoint farms.
I am absolutely confident that after these two projects, we’ve finally answered the looming question, "Can SharePoint scale?" with a resounding, "Yes!"
I hope that you’ll find this whitepaper beneficial in designing your SharePoint implementations whether small, medium, or large-scale. You can open or download the appropriate format of the whitepaper from the links below. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment on this blog entry.
My name is Paul Learning, a Senior Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services specializing in SharePoint deployments, and it’s with great excitement and pride that I announce the release of the SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper. This 90+ page whitepaper is based on a lot of hard work, dedication, and collaboration from a team of exceptional individuals; it documents the architectural design considerations and performance characteristics of a real-world, large-scale SharePoint lab implementation containing around 50 million content items, and reflects both “scale-up” and “scale-out” scenarios.
The hardware rig was provided by Fujitsu and included blade servers, rack servers, and an Eternus 4000 SAN with 10 TB of storage space. Special thanks to Greg Reuter, Jeff DeCarlo, and Brett Pierce from Fujitsu!
KnowledgeLake, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, was responsible for blasting 50 million content items into SharePoint; they also played a key role in defining the architecture, creating and executing the system tests, and gathering the massive results. KnowlegeLake was ultimately able to use their load tool to send 50 million documents into SharePoint at a peak rate of over 7 million documents per day! Very special thanks to Russ Houberg, Gregg Smith, Bob Bueltmann, Chuck Nash, and Ron Cameron from KnowledgeLake!
Of course, I simply can’t forget to mention all the incredible Microsoft people, who assisted in making this effort a success. First and foremost, our fearless leader, Andy Hopkins, who led the effort from start to finish and constantly amazed me with his enthusiasm and perseverance. I was equally impressed with Andy’s ability to wordsmith while editing our whitepaper. Next comes the long list of other exceptional individuals who stepped up to help out: Steve Peschka, Mike Taghizadeh, Thomas Rizzo, Ryan Duguid, Joel Oleson, Mitch Prince, Doron Bar-Caspi, Simon Skaria, Ambrose Treacy, Sid Shah, Grant Morisette, and Mitch Powers.
I could never have completed this project without the generous help of the people mentioned above. It was truly a collaborative team effort!
In addition to the project that resulted in the Scalability and Performance whitepaper, the KnowledgeLake folks and I were recently involved in another very challenging proof-of-concept for a large pharmaceutical company, which represented a large-scale SharePoint implementation containing 40 TB of content (about 75 million content items) spread across two SharePoint farms.
I am absolutely confident that after these two projects, we’ve finally answered the looming question, "Can SharePoint scale?" with a resounding, "Yes!"
I hope that you’ll find this whitepaper beneficial in designing your SharePoint implementations whether small, medium, or large-scale. You can open or download the appropriate format of the whitepaper from the links below. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment on this blog entry.
My name is Paul Learning, a Senior Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services specializing in SharePoint deployments, and it’s with great excitement and pride that I announce the release of the SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper. This 90+ page whitepaper is based on a lot of hard work, dedication, and collaboration from a team of exceptional individuals; it documents the architectural design considerations and performance characteristics of a real-world, large-scale SharePoint lab implementation containing around 50 million content items, and reflects both “scale-up” and “scale-out” scenarios.
The hardware rig was provided by Fujitsu and included blade servers, rack servers, and an Eternus 4000 SAN with 10 TB of storage space. Special thanks to Greg Reuter, Jeff DeCarlo, and Brett Pierce from Fujitsu!
KnowledgeLake, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, was responsible for blasting 50 million content items into SharePoint; they also played a key role in defining the architecture, creating and executing the system tests, and gathering the massive results. KnowlegeLake was ultimately able to use their load tool to send 50 million documents into SharePoint at a peak rate of over 7 million documents per day! Very special thanks to Russ Houberg, Gregg Smith, Bob Bueltmann, Chuck Nash, and Ron Cameron from KnowledgeLake!
Of course, I simply can’t forget to mention all the incredible Microsoft people, who assisted in making this effort a success. First and foremost, our fearless leader, Andy Hopkins, who led the effort from start to finish and constantly amazed me with his enthusiasm and perseverance. I was equally impressed with Andy’s ability to wordsmith while editing our whitepaper. Next comes the long list of other exceptional individuals who stepped up to help out: Steve Peschka, Mike Taghizadeh, Thomas Rizzo, Ryan Duguid, Joel Oleson, Mitch Prince, Doron Bar-Caspi, Simon Skaria, Ambrose Treacy, Sid Shah, Grant Morisette, and Mitch Powers.
I could never have completed this project without the generous help of the people mentioned above. It was truly a collaborative team effort!
In addition to the project that resulted in the Scalability and Performance whitepaper, the KnowledgeLake folks and I were recently involved in another very challenging proof-of-concept for a large pharmaceutical company, which represented a large-scale SharePoint implementation containing 40 TB of content (about 75 million content items) spread across two SharePoint farms.
I am absolutely confident that after these two projects, we’ve finally answered the looming question, "Can SharePoint scale?" with a resounding, "Yes!"
I hope that you’ll find this whitepaper beneficial in designing your SharePoint implementations whether small, medium, or large-scale. You can open or download the appropriate format of the whitepaper from the links below. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment on this blog entry.
In the Profile and Import Settings section look at the first item Number of user profiles:. If this number doesn’t match the Item Count from the Scope you are pulling too many items into your Local Office SharePoint Server sites Content Sources.
My name is Paul Learning, a Senior Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services specializing in SharePoint deployments, and it’s with great excitement and pride that I announce the release of the SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper. This 90+ page whitepaper is based on a lot of hard work, dedication, and collaboration from a team of exceptional individuals; it documents the architectural design considerations and performance characteristics of a real-world, large-scale SharePoint lab implementation containing around 50 million content items, and reflects both “scale-up” and “scale-out” scenarios.
The hardware rig was provided by Fujitsu and included blade servers, rack servers, and an Eternus 4000 SAN with 10 TB of storage space. Special thanks to Greg Reuter, Jeff DeCarlo, and Brett Pierce from Fujitsu!
KnowledgeLake, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, was responsible for blasting 50 million content items into SharePoint; they also played a key role in defining the architecture, creating and executing the system tests, and gathering the massive results. KnowlegeLake was ultimately able to use their load tool to send 50 million documents into SharePoint at a peak rate of over 7 million documents per day! Very special thanks to Russ Houberg, Gregg Smith, Bob Bueltmann, Chuck Nash, and Ron Cameron from KnowledgeLake!
Of course, I simply can’t forget to mention all the incredible Microsoft people, who assisted in making this effort a success. First and foremost, our fearless leader, Andy Hopkins, who led the effort from start to finish and constantly amazed me with his enthusiasm and perseverance. I was equally impressed with Andy’s ability to wordsmith while editing our whitepaper. Next comes the long list of other exceptional individuals who stepped up to help out: Steve Peschka, Mike Taghizadeh, Thomas Rizzo, Ryan Duguid, Joel Oleson, Mitch Prince, Doron Bar-Caspi, Simon Skaria, Ambrose Treacy, Sid Shah, Grant Morisette, and Mitch Powers.
I could never have completed this project without the generous help of the people mentioned above. It was truly a collaborative team effort!
In addition to the project that resulted in the Scalability and Performance whitepaper, the KnowledgeLake folks and I were recently involved in another very challenging proof-of-concept for a large pharmaceutical company, which represented a large-scale SharePoint implementation containing 40 TB of content (about 75 million content items) spread across two SharePoint farms.
I am absolutely confident that after these two projects, we’ve finally answered the looming question, "Can SharePoint scale?" with a resounding, "Yes!"
I hope that you’ll find this whitepaper beneficial in designing your SharePoint implementations whether small, medium, or large-scale. You can open or download the appropriate format of the whitepaper from the links below. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment on this blog entry.
About 8 months ago, we posted a “How We Did It” guest blog entry here about Microsoft Academy Mobile, a community driven videocast/podcast solution that had been built on the SharePoint platform and continues to be used internally at Microsoft. We received a lot of feedback from customers, mostly in the form of “Hey, that’s very cool, but how can I implement it for my own organization?” as well as many inquiries from partners in terms of “Can I get the source code, so I can leverage it as a building block for my enterprise social media solution offering?”
Well, we are very pleased to say, “Yes!” and “Yes!” to both questions by announcing the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS), available as an open source project at http://www.CodePlex.com/PKS. The PKS is an accelerator for social media, using podcasting and social networks to deliver the next generation knowledge management solution. Built on top of SharePoint Server 2007 and using Silverlight 2, the PKS delivers an integrated experience with a wide variety of devices including iPod, Zune, Windows Mobile phones, and other podcast capable devices. The PKS follows the same model and approach to open source community contributions and support as the Community Kit for SharePoint.
While the PKS is being implemented as a major upgrade to Academy Mobile within Microsoft, the following partners are ready to implement PKS-based commercially supported social media solutions for our customers.
3Sharp, as the primary developer of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint, has very deep technical knowledge of the Kit and can effectively leverage it to quickly implement custom social media applications for the enterprise. 3Sharp’s specialty is to build and implement business solutions that help customers get more out SharePoint and Office.
Accenture, the global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company, participated in the PKS pilot program along with several of our clients including British Telecom. Accenture is leveraging and extending SharePoint and the PKS to offer Enterprise 2.0 style learning and collaboration solutions to its clients. In addition to technology implementation, Accenture helps its clients drive measurable business value by addressing the strategy, people, and process components that are necessary to achieve high performance. For more info, contact thomas.w.hoglund [at] accenture.com.
Nintex is an innovative provider of SharePoint value added tools and solutions. Nintex will leverage the PKS as the foundation for their next generation Podcast Server product.
Customer and Partner Excitement
Peter Butler is the Head of Learning at British Telecom Group and chairs BT’s Learning Council, whose primary purpose is to maximize the ability of individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole to grow and transform in pursuit of the company’s strategic goals and objectives, has this to say about the PKS:
“British Telecom is very excited to be an early adopter of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint. With Accenture’s help, we are launching a pilot project to help 4,500 program and project managers collaborate and share information. We believe these new technologies will be an important enabler to sharing knowledge, experience, and ideas across our business units and in helping our employees reach an even higher level of performance.”
Tom Hoglund is a Partner in Accenture’s Talent & Organization Performance service line, which focuses on helping employees of client organization perform at a higher level through leveraging the tools of knowledge management, employee portals, collaboration, and learning. He has a global leadership role for Accenture’s practice in these areas and more than 25 years of consulting experience in leading numerous projects that have delivered millions of dollars of benefits to clients and touched hundreds of thousands of people. We’re very excited that someone like Tom is so excited about the potential of the PKS and has this to say about it:
“Corporate and public sector learning organizations have traditionally only addressed 20% of how employees learn. The PKS, combined with Accenture’s learning and collaboration experience, enables our clients to facilitate and accelerate learning, exactly when and where it is needed, independent of location or device. That’s a huge advantage.”
Solution Scenarios
Communications
Corporate Communications: Stay in touch with your executives
Multimedia Newsletters: Stay in touch with your colleagues
Training / eLearning 2.0
Give your employees the freedom to learn relevant information on-demand- anytime, anywhere
Allow your employees to share and learn from others
Partner Relationships
Advertise and drive awareness about your partner relationships internally
Innovation
Ask your most innovative people to find creative ways to share great ideas through audio and video podcasting
Digital Marketing / Advertisement
Directly reach out to your customers and create a social networking community that will generate interest
Lectures / Courses
Easily share, consume and publish lectures and training sessions in one centralized location
Create a virtual classroom discussion via commenting and instant messaging
Community Building
Stay connected with what’s new in the community to keep up-to-date
Generate a team oriented environment
Feature Highlights
PKS Home Page
PKS Podcast Page
PKS Podcaster Page
Open Source Community Excitement
The following open source projects have already been spawned from the PKS project:
EDEN Mobile RSS Client - Windows Mobile RSS client with podcast download queuing and resume.
MTC VBG Application - MTG VBG stands for “Microsoft Technology Center Virtual Bubblegum Application.” This Windows Vista application provides a rich 3D UI for the PKS.
Nintex Podcast Client 2008 - Podcast client for the PKS that enables podcast recording directly from your web browser.
To ensure that there will be even more PKS sub-projects in the near future, we have put aside some funding to subsidize turning the most compelling PKS feature ideas into actual functionality. Take a look at the PKS Discussions List for the current list of feature ideas and vote for your favorite(s), or you can add your own feature idea(s) to the list.
We Welcome Your Feedback!
We are very proud to be able to share the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint as an open source project with our customers and partners. We deeply believe in the potential of social media within the enterprise. At Microsoft, we’ve witnessed the following stats for the Academy Mobile application:
2,100+ total podcasts and growing every day
3,100+ registered podcaster accounts
3,700+ unique visitors in May, 2008
1,800 page views average per day
80,000+ downloads since July, 2007
We would love to hear about your enterprise social media success stories as well as any feedback on how we can work with the open source community to improve the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint. Please leave your comments under this blog entry or in the PKS discussion board.
Phil Morel, Director, Microsoft Academy, and sponsor of the PKS initiative Ludovic Fourrage, Group Program Manager, Microsoft Academy and the PKS initiative Paolo Tosolini, New Media Business Manager, Microsoft Academy and the PKS initiative Lawrence Liu, Senior Technical Product Manager, SharePoint Product Group liaison to the PKS initiative
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