Today the initial key notes and session on the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 has begun here in Las Vegas. The conference is fully booked with over 7400 registered attendees and is hosted at the Mandala Bay Hotel. There are over 240 different sessions covering everything within the new version of SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 is schedules to be released during the first half of next year however a public beta will be available now in November. I will try to cover the Enterprise Search perspective of this conference and summarize new features and functions in this blog.

The conference was started up through two key notes held by among others Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) and Jeff Teper (VP). They introduces new features in SharePoint 2010 on all levels from both really deep technical to end user perspective. Showing a lot of new cool features, where one feature was especially sticking out and that was Search. They all pointed out over and over again the importance of search as the core functionality of everything.

Enterprise Search

My first sessions during this conference was on Enterprise Search and the overview of this. A lot of new concepts and functions are introduced. I will try here to summarize some of the new functions in a list.

Sharepoint 2010 and Search Server 2010 (Not all is supported in Search Server)

• Wildcard search support
• Phonetic Spelling on person name searches
• Partitioned index/query (for scaling purposes)
• Support for up to 100 Million documents
• Zero query search – Used for using search as navigation
• Query Suggestion
• Refinement from meta data (Shallow navigators)
• Related Searches
• Federate Searches with Desktop
• Rating/Language used for relevance tuning
• View related content in people search
• Multiple crawler

FAST Search for SharePoint

• All above from SharePoint searches (some times they are even supposed to work together like people search is still done through SharePoint search)
• Visual preview and thumbnails
• Same APIs as SharePoint
• All administration is done through SharePoint administration
• Similar results
• Deep refinement navigators
• Entity extraction
• Visual Best bet
• Contextual Search
• No index profile any more. Everything is set through SharePoint administration even Navigators and meta data mappings.
• Can use BCS for connecting to other systems
• User context searching. Promote/denote documents and changing relevance after users context
• New search interface

That was a summary of the new features that is to come. I will come back every day to post updates and more detailed information about these features. To finish of I want to quote Microsoft: This is a quantum leap in Enterprise Search.