Leveraging and Optimizing Search in SharePoint 2010 : Customizing the FAST Search User Interface

The FAST Search Center, as shown in Figure 1, provides a rich user interface for accessing FAST Search Server capabilities from SharePoint 2010. The main parts of the FAST search results page are as follows:

• Search Box, with capability of suggestions while typing.

• Results set, with document thumbnails, PowerPoint previews, View in Browser links for all documents, and Similar Results link for all result.

• A Refinement Panel with deep refiners.

• Related Searches, People Matches, and Federated Results.

Figure 1. FAST Search Center.

Sorting Search Results

FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint provides the capabilities of sorting search results by property type, as shown in Figure 2. To change the default property that results are sorting by, or add/remove properties to the Sorting drop-down, open the results page in edit mode, and follow these steps:

1.	Locate the Search Action Links web part, and choose the action Edit Web Part.
2.	Expand the settings group Display Properties. Here you can find the properties available to sort by—for example, Site, Document Rank, Created Date, and so on. Select the check boxes for each property you want to add to the Sorting drop-down, and select the radio button of the property for default sorting, as shown in Figure 3. Figure 2. Sorting FAST Search results. Figure 3. Change the sorting settings of FAST Search results.
3.	Click OK and save the changes of the web part; then save and close your page.

User Contexts

In SharePoint 2010, people can have multiple properties stored in their profiles. These profile differences can be used to further refine search queries.

FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint enables us to give different result set to the different users, based on their profile properties. For example, the Sales Manager and the Software Developer gets different set of results to the query of ECM because the Ask Me About properties are different.

Of course, these differentiations are not configured by default; they have to be created by the administrators. The steps to configure different user contexts are the following:

1.	Go to the Site Collection Settings of your site.
2.	Choose the action FAST Search User Context.
3.	Here you can find the list of the user contexts defined before and can add a new one. Click Add User Context.
4.	Enter the name of the new user context (for example, Sales Managers or Developers).
5.	Provide the filter values Office Location and Ask Me About (for example, sales).
6.	Go back to the Site Collection Settings of your site.
7.	Choose the action FAST Search Keywords.
8.	Here you can define the keywords used by the FAST Search Server in your site. Create a new one with the name ECM.
9.	Set the new keyword’s properties. For example, Best Bets can be configured by user contexts. You can add URLs to display as a Best Bet for each user context. Do the same with Visual Best Bets, Document Promotions, and Demotions as well.
10.	Site Promotions and Demotions also can be set by user context. Go back to the Site Collection Settings of your site, and choose FAST Search Site Promotion and Demotion.
11.	Add new sites to be promoted or demoted, and set the user contexts to each of them (for example, Sales Managers or Developers).
12.	Go to your FAST Search Center, and try the new user context settings with various users and with different user contexts.