Last week I wrote a high level overview on The Search Developer Story in SharePoint 2010 over at the Enterprise Search Blog. Next, I'll provide a more detailed look at the different integration points in a series of blog posts. It will be aimed mainly at developers and architects wanting a better understanding of the technical architecture on the search side, and how to leverage the SharePoint platform for developing search driven applications.
Before diving into the details, let me provide a summary of the query side integration options. The diagram below shows the main query side integration points, applicable for both SharePoint Search and FAST Search for SharePoint, which now share a common platform and interfaces.
As shown in the figure, applications based on the SharePoint 2010 platform can leverage different query components (all available on the web front end in a SharePoint deployment). You can read more about the details of each integration point here, including benefits and some advanced features available with FAST Search only. For your convenience, here's a quick recap:
Search Web Parts Shared for SharePoint Search and FAST Search, providing a unified user experience Based on the Federation OM The main SharePoint object models on the query side are the Federation OM and the Query OM. The Federation Object Model (OM) A new object model in SharePoint 2010 Provides a unified interface to search against different locations/engines Allows for combining and merging of results Supports 3 locations out-of-box in SharePoint 2010 SharePoint Search FAST Search OpenSearch The Query Object Model (OM) The lower level, typed object model The object model that other services and object models are based on Communicates with the Search Service Application (SSA) for getting search results Integration points that also are available for applications outside SharePoint farm, e.g. standalone non-web based applications and Silverlight applications; The Query Web Service SOAP based ASMX service Uses same schema for FAST Search and SharePoint Search Provides search results, query suggestions, meta data and more The Query RSS Lightweight integration point
Search Web Parts
The main SharePoint object models on the query side are the Federation OM and the Query OM.
The Federation Object Model (OM)
The Query Object Model (OM)
Integration points that also are available for applications outside SharePoint farm, e.g. standalone non-web based applications and Silverlight applications;
The Query Web Service
The Query RSS
Coming up, more details on the Search Service Application, the object models, the web service and more. Stay tuned!