RDA Corporation

FAST Implementation Helps Booz & Company Improve Speed

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FAST Implementation Helps Booz & Company Improve Speed, Accuracy of Search Results

Project At a Glance

RDA developed a custom configuration of FAST Search for Booz & Company’s corporate intranet to enhance performance, increase flexibility, improve the relevancy of results, and reduce development costs.

About Our Client

Booz & Company is a global management and strategy consulting firm that creates and delivers essential advantage to the world’s top businesses, governments, and organizations.

Background

Booz & Company consultants rely on the firm’s vast store of intellectual capital documents as well as a global base of industry and subject matter experts available through their corporate intranet portal  to deliver value to their clients. Portal search results need to be quick, relevant, and accurate. The existing intranet focused on knowledge management and was built on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform. Booz had implemented a third party search application as well as a number of customizations to modify the look and feel of the intranet and search pages.

As the amount of information on the portal has grown, it has become increasingly difficult for Booz users to locate the information they need. These struggles have been compounded by the inability to manipulate the third party search tool to meet the search needs in the organization. Since they were not happy with the overall performance and the flexibility of their search engine, Booz engaged with RDA to implement FAST Search for SharePoint 2010. Booz plans to migrate its portal from SharePoint 2007 to the 2010 platform eventually, but was not yet ready to make the significant cost investment that such a migration would require. So RDA was tasked with making FAST for SharePoint 2010 work against their existing SharePoint 2007 portal implementation.

Solution Detail

RDA assisted Booz with the implementation of FAST Search for their corporate intranet in order to enhance search performance, increase flexibility, improve the relevancy of search results, and reduce development costs associated with using the third party search tool.

Because FAST was designed for the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 environment, RDA needed to perform some innovative custom configurations to make it work with the 2007 platform. RDA configured the FAST for SharePoint 2010 search engine to point at the SharePoint 2007 portal, and configured SharePoint 2010 People Search to point against the SharePoint 2007 user profiles.  Custom controls to access 3rd party hierarchical taxonomy settings were updated for the SP 2010 environment and Master Page customizations were migrated as well to ensure a consistent look and feel between the two environments.

In a subsequent project, RDA developed a new feature which allows Booz to take the results of a people search and export them to Excel. They use this for team building and engagement planning. Rather than going through search results page by page, they can export the entire search result to a spreadsheet and sort them any way they want. They can build the search, execute it, then take the results offline to continue staffing decisions.  The functionality uses the SP Search API along with the OpenXml SDK to generate the spreadsheet.

Benefits

Booz was looking to save both money and business time with the new search solution developed by RDA. The company is experiencing the following benefits as a result of this effort:

  • Enhanced performance. The solution delivers faster search results to help drive adoption and increase the efficiency of existing portal users.
  • Increased flexibility. FAST Search allows for more customization to meet the needs of the company.
  • Improved relevance of search results. Booz portal users are able to drill down more specifically to pinpoint exactly what they need.
  • Simplified administration. FAST Search provides easy to administer best bets and synonyms as well as provides readily accessible metrics which inform the team on how to optimize for the best search results.
  • Reduced costs. Booz is saving on development costs. There is no longer a need to create custom code to modify the search application.
  • In addition to these other benefits, the Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration Team at Booz & Company has regained significant credibility among the partnership as well as junior consultants by providing them with a vastly improved search experience..

In a post FAST implementation firmwide survey, over 75% of staff said that when searching for content they occasionally to always find what they are looking for. In a 2008 survey only 27% of staff could find what they were looking for.

Technically Speaking

RDA broke the implementation into the following steps:

  • Analysis of existing MOSS 2007 Intranet Information Architecture and customizations
  • Install development, test and production environments for SharePoint 2010 with FAST for Microsoft 2010.
  • Migration of Master Page customizations, styles, and custom user controls from MOSS 2007 to the SharePoint 2010 environment to maintain consistent look and feel
  • Creation of search scopes, managed properties, and customized FAST pipeline components for search to perform entity extraction from MOSS 2007 pages, document libraries, and external databases.
  • Creation of People Search scopes in SharePoint 2010 to point to MOSS 2007 user profiles.
  • Creation of custom SharePoint timer jobs to populate user profile information from external staffing database
  • Migration and customization of custom controls for data upload and advanced search from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010 that maintained compatibility with the 3rd party taxonomy controls used in the MOSS 2007 environment.
  • Creation of custom hierarchical refiners to meet search navigation customization requirements.