Optimizing Search
Both the regular SharePoint Server Search service application and FAST Search service application offer a rich platform to developers to create dynamic systems that are able to accommodate extremely large datasets. It can be leveraged to provide a way to aggregate content across multiple site collections as we will see in the next section.
The search system is complex, and indeed there are entire books written on the subject, but there are three key pieces that need to be understood as they will be leveraged in this solution:
Content sources
Search scopes
Managed properties
Content sources
Content sources define the locations that will be crawled. This can include both SharePoint resources as well as other systems like Exchange, network shares, or even public websites. Most administrators configure a single content source for SharePoint, and list out the root of each web application. This works fine, but by creating multiple content sources, you can leverage them within the...
