Indexing SharePoint 2007 MySites and User Profiles with SharePoint 2010 with FAST

Technorati Tags: FAST,Search,SharePoint 2010

Recently I was approached by a customer who wanted to replace the Google Search Appliance on their SharePoint 2007 farm with the FAST search engine in SharePoint 2010.  For a couple of reasons they didn’t want to upgrade the whole farm at this point and were concerned about indexing the MySite and User Profile information on the SharePoint 2007 farm.  I told them that I thought it was possible but hadn’t tried it so would get back to them.  I did some quick research but couldn’t find a definitive answer.  So I decided to setup an environment and try it for myself.  I started with the Microsoft provided SP2010 with FAST environment found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=751fa0d1-356c-4002-9c60-d539896c66ce&displaylang=en

I then built a SP 2007 environment on another VM that I had added to the Contoso domain.  I imported the user profile information into the SP2007 farm, and copied over the ‘Ask Me About’ descriptions.  I put the ‘Ask Me About’ information in the Skills profile column in SP2007 since the ‘Ask Me About’ profile column is new to SP 2010.

First lets look at a screen shot of the search results from the SP2010 MySites and User Profiles:

Then compare that to a screen shot of search results when indexing the SP2007 environment MySites and User Profiles.

As you can see they are nearly identical.  To get the ‘Ask Me About’ text to show up I did add the Crawled Properties People:SPS-Skills(Text) to the Responsibilities managed property but other than that it was seamless it worked without changes.  You will notice that the ‘Add as colleague’ and ‘Browse in organizational chart’ don’t appear in the SP2007 crawled information that is because SP2007 doesn’t support these features.

So with that happy indexing.

Andrew