Wednesday, June 29, 2011

FAST for SharePoint Service Pack 1

Together with SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1, FAST for SharePoint got a service pack on it’s own. you can download it from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26612
The most notable fixes for me are:
  • Improves default schema that improves relevancy
  • Better title and date extraction for Microsoft Office documents
  • Adds more flexible custom property extractors
  • Updated sample deployment templates <- Note: My example deployment templates were messed up during the install of SP1
  • Managed properties does no longer have to be in lowercase in the refinement panel configuration, in the query API’s or in FQL scope filters
  • Improves index backup and index restore
  • Improved indexing speed for several scenarios
  • Fixed index corruption when the indexer crashes
  • Functionality to add search columns to a live system [Edit: Was not included afterall, but will in a later CU]
  • Infotool.exe will pick up more log files and configuration files
As for the updated custom property extractors, the optionalprocessing.xml configuration file is now obsolete (but backwards compatible) and has been replaced by a new file called CustomPropertyExtractors.xml. (Both reside in C:\FASTSearch\etc\config_data\DocumentProcessor).
In this new file you can add as many extractor dictionaries as you want, not just three whole-word and two word-part dictionaries as was the limit before. And you can also have both case and case-insensitive matching.
There is a migration guide at: Migrate custom extractor to sp1