SharePoint Search Federation is a really underrated feature if you ask me. You can greatly improve your company’s knowledge management and create a single point of entry to all kind of data. Federation comes into play when you can not crawl the data source (too big or too complex).
With SharePoint 2013 and the very cool query templates you have literally thousand of options (to be honest you had them before but with XSLT its not that much fun) to enhance your search results.
A while ago I wrote about chocolatey and how to install a lot tools automatically. Thats especially handy if you have to set up a new environment for SharePoint 2013 RTM…
Now even more Today and yesterday I added two more packages - two tools that I always use and now I can add them in my scripted setup: ULSViewer and CKSDEV (Server)
CKSDev The Visual Studio Extension is installed if you have a Visual Studio 2010 or 2012 installed.
Writing SharePoint 2013 feels very new to me, but I created my first Demo environment and tried to set up search.
What needs to be done? 14 steps for a simple Search Topology - 1 powershell can do them all.
Create a Service Application Pool for the Search Service Application (15-22) Create a Search Service Application (22-28) Create a Search Service Application Proxy (30-36) Get the current Search Instance (38) Save the current Search Topology for later use (39) Create a new Search Topology (40) Create all the Search Components (Analytics- , Content Processing, Query Processing, Crawler-, Admin Component) (42-46) Remove the Index-Folder and recreate it (50-51) Create a new Index Component (53) Activate the new Topology (56) Call the method synchronize on the old topology - this errors but forces an update on the old topology object (59) The “forced updated” Topology object becomes inactive and can be deleted.
