Federated Search at Nashville SharePoint Users Group last night

I visited the Nashville SharePoint Users Group last night to talk about Setting up Federated Search. Unfortunately I was informed I could not use anything or say anything about my former employer... so I just decided to on a wing and a prayer to tell a story 'bout a Federated Search implementations from an anonymous aspect, without any props.

I talked about Search & Shared Service Provider (SSP) in the Central Admin web-kiosk.
But I couldn't show the clicks thanks to former employer X.
I talked about the local location - for indexing SharePoint itself normally - and the OpenSearch location - where you specify the url to perform the search and the XSLT for instance.

I told about how to put together the search pages, the search result pages, how to edit the webparts on the search results page to show more results. Once everything is setup and QA'ed, the idea for easy deployment is to use the export and import functionality for the webparts and locations.

So you get something working in staging and put it into production fast, exactly and safely by importing into production various settings files that you just exported from staging. This way you avoid debugging typos. Normally you can't know 100% everything. You ultimately have to edit something, either in an exported settings file or once it's imported.

Well, it went well with lots of questions and participation from the audience.

Dan