Professional SharePoint® 2010 Development

Chapter 6. Search

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Overview of the new Enterprise Search product line with guidance on which product to use for a given situation

• Tour of new architecture and user experience features

• Common patterns for developing extensions and applications with Enterprise Search

• Details on customizing all aspects of search, from user experience and social search to federation, connectors, and content processing

• Examples you can use to get started on custom search projects

Microsoft has been in the Enterprise Search business for a long time. The last two years have seen an increased focus in this area, including the introduction of Search Server 2008 and the acquisition of FAST Search and Transfer. Search is becoming strategic to many businesses, and Microsoft's investments reflect this.

Enterprise Search delivers content for the benefit of the employees, customers, partners, or affiliates of a single company or organization. Companies, government agencies, and other organizations maintain huge amounts of information in electronic form, including spreadsheets, policy manuals, and web pages, just to name a few. Contemporary private datasets can now exceed the size of the entire Internet in the 1990s — running into petabytes or even exabytes of information. This content may be stored in file shares, websites, content management systems, or databases, but without the ability to find this corporate knowledge, managing even a small company would be difficult.

Enterprise Search applications ...