Slides from Bill Cava's webinar on 8.5 Search. In this webinar, Bill Cava covers architecture, design, developer experience, and more.

1. The 8.5 Search Architecture

3. http://twitter.com/billcava

5. Agenda & Overview What’s New in 8.5 Search Search Design Considerations Search Developer Experience Keyword Query Syntax Search Framework API Search Framework UI – Templated Controls Search Architecture Crawling, Querying, Ranking, Diagnostics Hardware/Software Requirements

7. Supports All Types of Content

8. Features Include

9. Faceted Navigation

10. Narrow/Expand Queries Based on Taxonomies

11. Suggested Results

12. “Did you mean?”

13. Federated Search

14. Search Ektron, SharePoint, SAP, OpenText, IBM, Etc.

15. Dynamic Relevancy

16. Re-Order Search Results Based On User Behavior

17. Search High Availability Upgrade

19. Who Uses Search? What do they Want? Site Visitors Developers A modern site search experience Google & Bing like features Fast & relevant search results Auto corrections “Search just works” An API to query for content across properties A fast and reliable way to retrieve content Insight into the crawling process Insight into underlying queries and results returned

20. What is “Site Search?” Search as Navigation Site Search vs. Internet Search Search strategy, defined goals Features support strategy

21. What is “Application Search?” Use your search for more than simply site-search Search index has denormalized view of content Uses a Search API to deliver dynamic lists of data

22. Application Search Based Delivery Denormalized search index Search cross-cutting properties Provide a content list based on a folder, tagged with a category, with certain metadata. Strength of Site Search

23. “We have made a very strong effort into producing a usableand extensibleSearch API in the 8.5 Release” – Chris Banner, 8.5 Search Engineer @ ektron Usability A compact API; performs complex searches using short, expressive syntax Extensibility Abstraction layer over search Provides future proofing for future releases An upgrade safe search and a maintainable search platform

24. Developer Experience 3 Ways to Retrieve Search Results Keyword Query Syntax Search Framework API Search Framework UI’s Templated Server Controls

25. Keyword Query Syntax Basic Search Boolean Operators – AND, OR, NOT Group phrases w/ parens– ((a OR b) AND c) Wildcards – run*, account* Managed Properties – contentId, folderId Metadata – ektron/metadata/[name]/[type] > 0 SmartForm Data – ektron/sf/[name]/[type] : “value”

26. Intro to Search Framework API Three Elements of Search Framework API Search Manager manager.Search(criteria) Search Criteria criteria.QueryText= "ektron"; SearchResponse Data Type

27. Search Manager usingEktron.Cms.Framework.Search; SearchManagermanager = newSearchManager(); SearchManagermanager = newSearchManager(ApiAccessMode.Admin); SearchManagermanager = newSearchManager( ApiAccessMode.LoggedInUser);

28. Search Criteria usingEktron.Cms.Framework.Search; KeywordSearchCriteriacriteria = newKeywordSearchCriteria(); criteria.QueryText = "ektron";

29. Advanced Search Criteria usingEktron.Cms.Framework.Search; AdvancedSearchCriteriacriteria = new AdvancedSearchCriteria(); criteria.ExpressionTree = SearchContentProperty.Title.Contains("web");

30. Advanced Search Criteria usingEktron.Cms.Framework.Search; AdvancedSearchCriteriacriteria = new AdvancedSearchCriteria(); criteria.ExpressionTree = SearchContentProperty.Title.Contains("web") & !SearchContentProperty.Title.Contains("cms");

31. Advanced Search Criteria usingEktron.Cms.Framework.Search; AdvancedSearchCriteriacriteria = new AdvancedSearchCriteria(); criteria.ExpressionTree = (SearchContentProperty.Title.Contains("web") & !SearchContentProperty.Title.Contains("cms")) | SearchContentProperty.Title.Contains(“ektron");

32. Advanced Search Criteria SearchContentProperty.Title SearchContentProperty.DateCreated SearchContentProperty.Private SearchContentProperty.FolderName SearchContentProperty.Id SearchContentProperty.ExpiryDate SearchContentProperty.ExpiryType SearchContentProperty.Author ... only a subset, dozens more available

33. Framework API vs Search API? Framework API Returned a ContentData object Queries against the source of truth Querying against ContentData properties Simple criteria using Filters Search API Returned a SearchResult object Search Indexes aren’t instantly updated Querying against properties that span types (taxonomy, etc) Complex criteria using expression trees

34. Demo:Search Framework API

35. Search Framework UI Templated Server Controls “We built the templated controls to be a base for our customers to use to build their websites. They’re designed to be flexible.” – Steve Mann, 8.5 Search Engineer Tight, semantic markup means designers customize the look and feel just by using CSS No XSLT needed. Markup controlled using ASP.NET templates

36. Search Framework UI Templated Server Controls SiteSearch Site Search Interface Simple controls No JavaScript Dependencies UserSearch ProductSearch XmlSearch

37. Demo: search Templated controls

38. What About Upgrades? If you use the … Legacy Search Server Controls (pre-8.5) Legacy Search API (pre-8.5) Then … Your upgraded site will route through new architecture Recommended to upgrade code to use the new APIs & Controls

39. What About Upgrades? If you wrote CISSO queries … Need to rewrite queries to use the new Search API or Server Controls If you used Integrated Search feature Needs to be reconfigured to use 8.5 Federated Search capabilities

40. Search Architecture

41. What is crawling? A crawl is the process by which search server pulls data from the CMS to construct its internal indexes

42. Crawl Types

43. Crawling Process

44. Querying Process

45. Diagnostic tools & Administration Console Status information on crawling process Readily accessible through the Workarea Advanced information through Microsoft Search Server Admnistrative Console

46. Hardware Requirements Processor Requirements 64-bit, Quadcore RAM Requirements For development: 4 GB For evaluation or single-server production use: 8 GB For multiple-server production use: 16 GB

47. For SQL Server used by Search Server

48. Disk Space Rule of Thumb: Index size + 80 GB free space, plus 2x the ram on the production Note Search stores full-text index file on the file system of the query servers

49. Software Requirements Operating System The 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Server with Service Pack 2 (SP2). The 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Server.

50. Database Server The 64-bit edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Cumulative Update 2 (CU2), CU5 or CU6. The 64-bit edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 with Service Pack 3 (SP3) Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Software Requirements

52. http://twitter.com/billcava

53. bill.cava@ektron.com