Beginning SharePoint® 2007 Administration: Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

8.3. Searching in WSS and MOSS

One of the greatest time savers is search engines. Just look at how often you use MSN Search or Google, just to mention a couple of them. On the Internet, searching is absolutely critical, since you have no idea where information is stored, and there may be new sources one minute from now. That is why you search all the time. This is not really that different from the way you use your internal network. True, the volume of information is much smaller in your network, and you know where at least some of it is stored, since you created it. Still, it does not take much activity within an organization to create so much information that the average user loses track of where things are stored. So, users start looking around to find the file, document or whatever they are looking for. After some minutes, they find it. The question then becomes is this the latest version, or is there a newer version somewhere? Then when they get what they're looking for, they most likely want to be notified if that document gets updated later on. What you need is a solution that helps you:

• Find information regardless of where it is stored.

• Make sure that it is the latest version.

• Send a notification to you when this information is updated.

SharePoint has solutions for the first bulleted item, but there is a great difference between what MOSS is offering and the WSS environment, as the following section will cover in more detail. The second bullet is covered by the built-in ...