406 CHAPTER 14 coNfigUriNg aNd maNagiNg eNterPrise search FIGURE 1424 As you can see, there is a lot going on with the Search Administration page, and a lot of configura- tion options. Although all the various options can make setting up Search properly seem a little intimidating, we hope this overview has provided a strong base from which you can further explore this robust feature. Other Search Features A couple more Search features worth mentioning are Mobile Search and People Search: Mobile Search — SharePoint 2010 has made some great strides forward with enhanced mobile support. One such advance is the addition of Mobile Search. From the mobile browser, the user can do a search and even choose a scope. Search results are displayed with a simplified interface, as shown in Figure 14-25. No graphics, no previews or suggestions, just what they came for — search results. If you want to see how this works from the comfort of your desk- top PC, you can. From your Search site, click Site Settings. On the right side of the page, click the Mobile Site URL. Now have all the fun of a mobile experience without wearing out your thumbs. SharePoint Server and Search Server 407 FIGURE 1425 People Search — People Search is covered in more detail in Chapter 17 but some highlights are worth mentioning here. Phonetic and nickname matching is very powerful. For example, search for the name fillups and you will get results for “Phillips.” Similarly, if you are looking for Jeff but cannot remember if it is Geoff or Jeff, no worries: Search for Jeff and get both. Looking for Bill will get you results for William as well. This is very powerful for enhancing discoverability. 408 CHAPTER 14 coNfigUriNg aNd maNagiNg eNterPrise search Earlier we noted some “secret” improvements were made to relevancy. That goes for People Search as well. As a matter of fact, the people relevancy is so good in SharePoint 2010 that even when you use FAST Search for SharePoint, results for people searches come from SharePoint Search. FAST Search for SharePoint only indexes content — not people. When search queries include people results, content results from FAST and People results from SharePoint search are brought together in one unified set in the query object model on the query server, as shown in Figure 14-26. Content Content People Fast Search SharePoint Search • Provides familiar SharePoint interface • Brings Search Results together • Enhanced experience with new Web Parts Query Object Model Web Front End Server FIGURE 1426 When it comes to People Search, one of the most popular queries is searching for one’s own name. Search recognizes this type of query, returning the results in a special box, as shown in Figure 14-27. It indicates how many times people did a search that lead to you and what keywords they were searching when they found you. This insight can help you tune your My Site to make you easier to find (or harder if you are the shy type). FIGURE 1427 FAST SEARCH FAST Search for SharePoint Sites and FAST Search for Internet Sites take all of the goodness described in the previous section and give it a giant shot of adrenaline. SharePoint Search can view results in the browser using the OWAs? FAST Search can preview PowerPoint presentations within the actual search results. SharePoint Search has refiners for the first 50 documents? FAST does it for FAST Search 409 all documents in the results set. SharePoint Search can handle some 100 million items in the index? FAST is looking at closer to one billion items. You get the drift. Everything to the extreme. This section offers a brief look at some of the key FAST differentiators. Because FAST was a bit late to the game for this version of SharePoint, documentation for it is still limited. As FAST matures, expect entire books dedicated to it. Thumbnails One of the first things you’ll notice when you do a FAST Search is the thumbnails that show up in the search results. This is useful if you are doing a search and can’t remember which document you are look- ing for just by seeing the title. A quick thumbnail of the documents helps to determine the right one. Scrolling Preview Clicking on the thumbnail of a PowerPoint document opens a scrolling preview of the slides, enabling you to determine whether it has the content you might be looking for. If you consider this on a larger scale, imagine if you were looking for information in a presentation but couldn’t remember exactly which slide deck had the specific file you were looking for. You could do a search and then open each slide deck one by one, which might take several minutes; or you could quickly take a look at the slides directly from the FAST Search results page, which would take only seconds to find the content you want. Similar Results Have you ever searched for a document, finally got to what you were looking for, and then thought to yourself that it would be great if you could find more documents just like the one you found? Results in FAST Search enable users to click a Similar Results link to view other content that is simi- lar to a specific document. Essentially, FAST looks at the metadata for the original document and calculates which other documents are most like it. User Context Every organization has groups of users, and each group views content across the organization in a unique way. Salespeople generally care about different things than server administrators care about. One of the most powerful capabilities of FAST Search is the capability to target different user contexts. More simply, a user context is a group of users — you can think of it similarly to a search scope. Search administrators can define a user context based on values specified by a user’s profile. You could specify a user context based on office location, specialty, interests, project experience, or even hobbies. Once the user context has been defined, you can use it for all sorts of fun things — such as best bets, visual best bets, or for pro- moting or demoting documents. The user context itself is just the definition of a group of users. The real power is how it can be used in combination with other features to target content at different groups. Visual Best Bets SharePoint has always had best bets (covered in the “SharePoint Server” section earlier in the chap- ter). In a nutshell, they allow an administrator to return for specific links when a user searches on a specific keyword. For example, you can configure SharePoint to specify to always show a link to the proposal template when a user does a search on the term proposal. 410 CHAPTER 14 coNfigUriNg aNd maNagiNg eNterPrise search FAST Search takes the idea of best bets to the next level with visual best bets. Basically, it is exactly what it sounds like it is — a best bet with a picture. Administrators can control several aspects of the visual best bet to gain even greater control over when it shows. Not only can the keyword be used to determine when the visual best bet is displayed, it can be further controlled by specifying the start and end date, and for which user context to show the visual best bet. For example, maybe there is a project management conference scheduled and you want the visual best bet to be displayed only dur- ing the month before the conference and only to project managers who type in a specific search term (see Figure 14-28). FIGURE 1428 Promote/Demote Documents FAST Search enables search administrators to specify content that should get a boost or decrease in relevancy ranking. This can be done for all users or for a specific group. For example, imagine a scenario in which different proposals were submitted for project work. Perhaps one proposal is suc- cessful and the other is not. Search administrators could provide a relevancy boost to the successful proposal and decrease the relevancy of the unsuccessful document, affecting the results when some- one searches on the keyword proposal. Promotions and demotions can be targeted at specific groups. Using the previous example, maybe it is necessary to adjust the relevancy of the proposals for only project managers — search administra- tors could specify the user context to target, as well as the start and end date indicating how long the promotion or demotion should apply for the content. SUMMARY This chapter provided you with a basic tour of the main components of Search. In addition to set- ting up Search and adding servers and databases, you now know how to create host distribution rules, refine searches, administer Search, and much more. Understanding these fundamental aspects of Search should enable you to continue your exploration of this large topic with confidence, and to further enhance the search experience of your users. Monitoring SharePoint 2010 WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER? Improvements in diagnostic log management Using correlation IDs Using the logging database If you’ve made it this far you’ve got SharePoint 2010 installed and running. You’ve created a web application or two and uploaded some content. You’ve probably confi gured some service applica- tions and sent them off to do their work. SharePoint is doing its thing and life is good. You might be tempted to lean back in your chair and put your feet up, but your adventure is not fi nished. While SharePoint might be spinning like a top now, the day will come when there are problems. When that happens, you will need to know how to fi nd out what’s troubling SharePoint so that you can fi x it. A lot of work has been put into monitoring in SharePoint 2010. So much has been added that Monitoring has been given its own tab in Central Administration. SharePoint will report errors, but you need to know where to fi nd them. This chapter will show you how to keep an eye on SharePoint, both in proactive and reactive ways so that you can keep your SharePoint servers in tip-top shape. This will enable you to fi x SharePoint when it’s broken, as well as see where problem areas are before they become bad enough that your end users com- plain. Nobody likes that. UNIFIED LOGGING SERVICE We will start our journey toward SharePoint monitoring enlightenment with the Unifi ed Logging Service (ULS). To the seasoned SharePoint administrator, the ULS logs are nothing new. They have been around for a version or two of SharePoint. SharePoint 2010 carries on that tradition but improves on it. The ULS surfaces information in three different places; trace logs, Windows Event Viewer, and a new reporting database. This chapter covers all three areas and explains how they differ. 15 412 CHAPTER 15 moNitoriNg sharePoiNt 2010 ULS is sort of like SharePoint’s tattletale. It is only a logging service; it does not act on any of the events that it sees. However, as you’ll see later in this chapter, SharePoint monitoring is more than just the ULS logs and is not always passive. The ULS service’s purpose in life is to provide the SharePoint administrators or operations teams with all the information they need to solve problems, or head prob- lems off at the pass. The hope is that with all the information that ULS provides, you should be able to spend fewer resources keeping an eye on SharePoint; and in the unlikely event of a SharePoint prob- lem, the ULS should provide you with the information you need to resolve the problem quickly. Trace Logs When most SharePoint administrators hear “ULS” they immediately think of the ULS logs that they have been using for years with previous versions of SharePoint. In SharePoint 2010 these are offi- cially referred to as the trace logs. The trace logs have a similar address to their counterparts in pre- vious versions of SharePoint. You can find them in the Logs folder of C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ . That’s quite a mouthful, so Microsoft has lovingly christened that path the “SharePoint Root.” You may also hear some less refined people refer to it as the “14 Hive.” Figure 15-1 shows what you can expect to see if you look for the ULS trace logs in Explorer. The filename consists of the server name, the date in four-digit year, month, and date order, followed by the time in 24-hour format. You’ll also notice that the duration between log file creation is always exactly 30 minutes apart, at least while the machine is on. This is the default setting, although you can use Windows PowerShell to change this. See the sidebar for more information on using PowerShell with trace logs. FIGURE 151 . relevancy is so good in SharePoint 2010 that even when you use FAST Search for SharePoint, results for people searches come from SharePoint Search. FAST Search for SharePoint only indexes content. versions of SharePoint. In SharePoint 2010 these are offi- cially referred to as the trace logs. The trace logs have a similar address to their counterparts in pre- vious versions of SharePoint. . moNitoriNg sharePoiNt 2010 ULS is sort of like SharePoint s tattletale. It is only a logging service; it does not act on any of the events that it sees. However, as you’ll see later in this chapter, SharePoint