Office 365

300 attendees on a Saturday - all “SharePoint-crazy”. Its my first visit to Belgium and I must say: I am impressed of the community and the spirit here. In the following I recap SharePoint Saturday 2015 in Antwerp. SPSBE From the start at 9:00am until the official end of SPSBE (SharePoint Saturday Belgium) at around 17:30 I had good fun. I apparently had to prepare my session on this Saturday, tests my demos and optimize my slides - so I could only attend one full session (see my summary here), but there was enough time for me to talk to community members, board members and other speakers - good times, good fun.

Improve the value of search results by managing Relevance. SharePoint 2013 and O365 provide a comprehensive set of tools to manage Search Relevance. SharePoint 2013 and O365 combine and improve upon the best tools available for Fast Search and SharePoint 2010, and introduce the notion of Query Rules that allow administrators to influence relevance for a single query or sets of queries using a straightforward user interface. In this talk, we will explain how ranking works under the hood, and give hands on demonstrations of how to use query rules, result sources, XRANK, federation to external search providers, and use the rank tuning tool to improve relevance and the value of your search solutions.

In this session we will dig into the new architecture for Search in SharePoint 2013. We will cover all architectural components, plus discuss the differences between the 2013 release versus FAST Search and search in SharePoint 2010. Microsoft has updated topology models for different sized deployments. This will be presented along with sizing and scaling data for both physical and virtual machines - actionable data you can use to assess and use during your planning phase.