SharePoint Search Architecture @ Ignite 2015

For those of you here at Microsoft Ignite, welcome! It's really exciting to be part of this massive event and with only a day under our belts, we've already seen some really cool announcements, not the least of which is the continued innovation on the Office Graph and Delve.

On Friday afternoon, Dan Benson and I will be presenting on SharePoint Search architecture. We are going to talk about how you can ensure your enterprise search capabilities can scale and be available all the time. Please don’t read too much into our timeslot. With the awesomeness of Office 365, this might seem like a moot topic but the reality is that most enterprises still require some investment in their on-premises architecture to support legacy applications and content that is not quite ready for the cloud. SharePoint Search provides the most robust bridge through its hybrid capabilities to ensure a seamless user experience for accessing on-premises and cloud content. So, please come join us to learn how your on-premises infrastructure can scale to meet the demands of your business!

 

At the time of posting, there was an issue with the conference scheduling tool. I will update the post as soon as possible with a direct link to our presentation. For now, go search for “Summers” under the speaker tab of the search interface and you’ll find a link to our presentation.

In advance of the presentation, I wanted to post some of the materials we'll be showing. Specifically, we'll be walking through a few different PowerShell scripts for defining and deploying your initial search topology and then expanding that initial topology to support the growing demands of your business. Additionally, we built a simple JavaScript tool for monitoring the health of your search system. For all of these, the code is simple at best, flaky at worst so please use at your own risk. However, we are typically asked for access to the code we show during our presentations so I thought I would provide it in advance rather than accepting a bunch of business cards and losing track of my promise to post the code later.

If you're not attending this week, please look for our presentation on Channel9 once the conference is over. I will try to update this post with a direct link once it is available.

Both the PowerShell scripts and search monitoring code are accessible on this OneDrive share.

For the search monitoring code, I plan to follow this post up with another post detailing how to deploy it. Bear in mind that it references 3rd party libraries but those are not included in my downloads. Also, the SP.Search.js code is something I’ve been working on here and there for some time. It’s also accessible on GitHub here. At this very moment, the code I posted to my OneDrive might be more up-to-date than the GitHub repo.

I'm excited about our presentation on Friday and for those of you still in town, I hope you'll stop by to see us. Last, if you're interested in any of my insights as an attendee, feel free to follow me on Twitter.