Exam 74-676:

FAST Enterprise Search Platform, Developing

Published:	June 17, 2009
Language(s):	English
Audience(s):	IT Professionals,Developers
Technology:	Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Type:	Proctored Exam

How To Get It: Schedule your exam through the following exam provider:

Take exam

Show all items Hide all items

Overview

Preparing for an Exam

This exam is scheduled to retire on July 31, 2012.

• View information about exam retirements

The Microsoft Certification website and this preparation guide contain a variety of resources to help you prepare for an exam. Preparing for and Taking an Exam — FAQ provides answers to frequently asked questions about exam registration ,preparation ,scoring ,and policies , including:

The most effective way to prepare to take an exam.
The relationship between Microsoft training materials and exam content.
Microsoft policy concerning the incorporation of service pack and revision updates into exam content.
Exam question types and formats.
Exam time limits and number of questions asked.

We recommend that you review this preparation guide in its entirety and familiarize yourself with the FAQs and resources on the Microsoft Certification website before you schedule your exam.

Exam Topics Covered

This exam validates skills needed by candidates who perform deep customization of FAST ESP-based enterprise search solutions via application development and configuration.

Audience Profile

Candidates for this exam are application developers, sales engineers, system integrators, search consultants, and architects who have 6 months or more experience in implementing search solutions by using ESP 5.3 or earlier 5.x versions, including:

installing and configuring ESP
feeding documents into ESP
building a search application

Note This preparation guide is subject to change at any time without prior notice and at the sole discretion of Microsoft. Microsoft exams might include adaptive testing technology and simulation items. Microsoft does not identify the format in which exams are presented. Please use this preparation guide to prepare for the exam, regardless of its format.

Skills Measured

Skills Being MeasuredThis exam measures your ability to accomplish the technical tasks listed below.The percentages indicate the relative weight of each major topic area on the exam.The higher the percentage, the more questions you are likely to see on that content area on the exam.

The information after “This objective may include but is not limited to” is intended to further define or scope the objective by describing the types of skills and topics that may be tested for the objective. However, it is not an exhaustive list of skills and topics that could be included on the exam for a given skill area. You may be tested on other skills and topics related to the objective that are not explicitly listed here.

Designing and Deploying an ESP System (20 percent)

Design for fault tolerance.

This objective may include but is not limited to: index subsystem, search subsystem, admin services, document processing subsystem, query and results subsystem

Design for performance.

This objective may include but is not limited to: designing a system for each of the following performance metrics: query rate, document count, content dynamics, search latency, index latency

Deploy ESP.

This objective may include but is not limited to: single node, multinode, installing the product from an installation profile, post-installation validation

Monitor and debug the system.

This objective may include but is not limited to: viewing ESP log files, checking system health, diagnosing slow response time

Implement security for search results.

This objective may include but is not limited to: Security Access Module (SAM), by collection

Implement ESP infrastructure security.

This objective may include but is not limited to: ports and firewalls

Feeding Content (21 percent)

Feed Web content.

This objective may include but is not limited to: configuring Enterprise Crawler, authenticating crawler, exporting/importing a crawler configuration

Feed from a relational database.

This objective may include but is not limited to: configuring the JDBC connector

Feed files.

This objective may include but is not limited to: File Traverser, incremental mode

Build a custom content feeding application.

This objective may include but is not limited to: using Content API, creating a custom connector by using CCTK

Processing Content (22 percent)

Configure document processing stages.

This objective may include but is not limited to: configuring a new instance of a default stage, including setting parameters; common stages (for example, AttributeMapper, AttributeCopy); configuring an Entity Extraction document processing stage

Implement pipelines.

This objective may include but is not limited to: contextual and fielded searches for unstructured content and XML content

Create custom-coded document processing stages.
Map content to fields.

This objective may include but is not limited to: various methods of mapping (for example, AttributeMapper, JDBC)

Searching Content and Retrieving Results (21 percent)

Create a query.

This objective may include but is not limited to: composing a query string, including using FQL; setting query processing parameters; creating and managing search profiles by using Search Business Center (SBC)

Run a search and display the results.

This objective may include but is not limited to: built-in Search Front End (SFE) Web interface; Query Results Server (QR Server) Web interface

Build a front-end search client .

This objective may include but is not limited to: using Search API, using HTTP interface by means of URL parameters

Create an index profile.

This objective may include but is not limited to: fields, composite fields, scope fields, result views, teasers, sorting, navigators, supervised clustering, unsupervised clusteringItem idea: We want to create a query that looks in parts of a document (scope search)

Implementing Relevancy and Linguistics (16 percent)

Configure relevancy tuning in the index profile.

This objective may include but is not limited to: tuning relevancy by using a rank profile, configuring composite fields

Implement query boosts and blocks.

This objective may include but is not limited to: configure relevancy tuning in the SBC

Set static rank.

This objective may include but is not limited to: Index tools such as document boost, configuring relevancy tuning in document processing

Manage dictionaries.

This objective may include but is not limited to: entity extraction dictionaries, synonym dictionaries, dictman, SBC, deploying dictionaries, and configuring synonyms

Implement lemmatization.
Influence relevancy in a query.

This objective may include but is not limited to: rank operator, filter operator

Preparation Materials

Preparation Tools and ResourcesTo help you prepare for this exam, Microsoft Learning recommends that you have hands-on experience with the product and that you use the following training resources. These training resources do not necessarily cover all of the topics listed in the "Skills Measured" tab.

Learning Plans and Classroom Training There is no classroom training currently available.

Microsoft E-Learning There is no Microsoft E-Learning training currently available.

Microsoft Press Books There are no Microsoft Press books currently available.

Practice Tests There are no practice tests currently available.

Microsoft Online Resources

FAST University: A structured learning service that provides technical training for customers and partners who want to gain an in-depth understanding of our search technology. Students can register for all of these classes and tutorials from the FAST University Learning Portal

Classroom Training