In spite of the weather, I still had some people show up to my updated SharePoint Search talk, Getting the most out of SharePoint Search.  This talk relates closely to my recent blog post Are you getting the most out of SharePoint Search.  The talk focused on understanding the basics of search and how you can improve the search experience for your users.  I reiterated the theme that Search is only as good as the information you provide it.  I also gave the attendees of a choice of seeing the demo with Search Server Express, SharePoint Server, or FAST Search for SharePoint.  They ended up choosing FAST and I spent a good amount of time showing off the new features.  This is the first time I have dared giving a demo using a FAST VM and it worked fairly well.  I only had queries time out  and fail on me twice. :)  I also showed some of the basics of using FAST Query Language (FQL) with a code demo showing how you can dynamically affect ranking.  I hope everyone enjoyed the talk.  For those that didn’t attend because of the snow you really missed out.  We didn’t even have any snow accumulation the entire night. :)  You can find my slides from the talk on SlideShare.

Getting the most out of SharePoint Search