There are a lot of misconceptions around how to use the Refinement Panel in SharePoint 2010 which is a real shame because it is extremely powerful for out of the box configuration, let alone how extensible it might be for developers. (Did anyone like the thumbnail on this post? Refinement Panel -> Refinery picture? Get it?)

So in this article I am going to talk about one specific group of options within the Refinement Panel, that been the Refinement Options:

The Federated Search capabilities in SharePoint 2010 allow you to issue a search query against other external search providers and have this shown in line with your local search results.

I speak frequently on the topic of search at various conferences, and one of the challenging parts about this subject is that many of the demos simply take a lot of time.  For example, if I wanted to do a demo about to show how users could search on their own custom fields it would require that I subject the audience to sit there while I run some indexes.  Which is no fun to watch, and I simply don’t have enough bad jokes to keep an audience entertained for more than 30 seconds at the most. 

I’m writing this post as a way to provide the steps required to do that demo for creating your own custom fields.

Content Management and Enterprise Search are kissing cousins, but how can you make them really sing together? This session will provide a deep dive and best practices into how to best use search with ECM with SharePoint 2010. We will show how to optimize findability in different scenarios, including discovery and hold; how to combine search across active and archived content and across ECM as well as other sources; how to improve tagging and determine content migration priorities using search for visibility; and much more. If you are planning a complex ECM initiative (or in the midst of one), this session is for you.