FAST / SharePoint 2010 Server Gotchas

I wanted to post out a couple things that I have found recently that may cause some confusion when trying to integrate an Existing SharePoint 2010 Environment with FAST Search.

If you already have an existing Search SSA you can safely remove this once you install and configure your FAST environment.   This SSA is NOT needed.   FAST has two seperate SSA's:

FASTContent - This SSA will hold the Content Source for all the sites that will be crawled under the FAST Search Engine.

FAST Query - This SSA in simply responsible for the sps3://  (profile imports)

Now the confusion will arise when you create a new web application and expect it to go directly into the FAST Content SSA  Content Source.   It does not.   It will go directly to the FAST Query SSA Content Source.

What does all this mean?   RIght now you need to ensure that any sites that you want to crawl live inside the FAST Content SSA.   You will need to manually move any sites you create from the FAST Query to the FAST Content Content Source.

Just something to keep in mind.  Not a huge deal but will be another step for Admins to put on thier checklists.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 03, 2010
  Hey Bob, I just ran into this issue, I though I did something wrong in the install. But I guess you have to build your own content sources in FastContent. The other thing that's confusing is FastQuery SSA looks like FastContent SSA. But with FastQuery SSA you'll see 'local SharePoint Sites' but you don't see this under FastContent SSA.