SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Enterprise Search

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the new Microsoft enterprise search solution for organizations. It increases productivity and reduces information overload by providing users with the ability to find relevant content in many different locations and formats. The key is actionable search results that respect security permissions.

Features

The "Enterprise Search" functional area can be summed up with the following feature list:

• Relevance

• Business data search

• Metadata

• Customizable user experience

• Extensibility

Figure 1-20. People-finding search capabilities

Relevance

Relevance is very important when searching for data. If you have ever searched on Google, you have probably realized that the relevance of your search is the key to getting usable results. The new and improved search algorithms within MOSS 2007 are tuned for enterprise content. The use of relevance and ranking factors—such as click distance, hyperlink anchor text, URL depth, and metadata extraction—provide effective algorithms for yielding the best results for enterprise content. Microsoft has invested a great deal in fine-tuning this solution.

Another aspect of relevance is the search results are rendered more clearly. Search results are security trimmed, which keeps users from seeing content to which they do not have access. The results also include user-friendly features such as hit highlighting, duplicate collapsing, and synonym suggestion. Another cool feature allows integration with real-time communications tools, so users can easily contact content authors and experts. You can execute a search, view the results, see whether the creator is online, and then open a chat with the content developer. That kind of ease of use will be invaluable within a large enterprise.

Figure 1-21. Colleagues Web Part

Figure 1-22. Audience-targeting feature of MOSS 2007

The people search capabilities bring even more relevance. Users can now find people not only by department or job title, but also by expertise, social distance, and common interests.

Figure 1-23. Screen for editing public permissions on content in "Personal Documents"

Business data search

Business data search allows you to search the data residing in your line-of-business applications using the Business Data Catalog. Structured content sources, line-of-business application data, and reports accessible through web services or ADO.NET can be indexed and retrieved through the Business Data Catalog. The results can be easily displayed within a SharePoint list, allowing users to make relevant decisions on data using an integrated environment.

Metadata

Content types help users organize their SharePoint content in a more meaningful way. A content type is a reusable collection of settings that you can apply to a certain category of content. Content types enable you to manage the metadata and behaviors of a document or item type in a centralized, reusable way. You can store multiple types of content in the same SharePoint library or list. Using content types, MOSS 2007 allows users to create and manage metadata, which helps generate content search results that are more relevant to the user.

Customizable user experience

MOSS 2007's new user experience is simple and clean, but also very powerful. The user interface has industry-standard query syntax as well. The fact that scopes are decoupled from content sources allows users to easily broaden or narrow the scope of a content search. Searches can be based on content properties such as type, URL, and author. Actionable search results can be sorted and filtered. The search results can be shared with other users, and users can also create alerts and RSS feeds to provide updated results for common queries.

Extensibility

Enterprise content sources can be searched for more than 200 file types in nearly every possible content location. The enterprise search capabilities allow data to be searched in files shares, SharePoint sites, web sites, Exchange Public Folders, and Lotus Notes databases out of the box, with the ability to extend to additional third-party repositories and file types through the use of Protocol Handlers and iFilters.

The administration and management features have also been improved. The user interfaces and admin application programming interface (API) provides broad support for various search and indexing scenarios. There is also extensive support for central controls for resource-intensive operations to allow for more granular control over processes that might otherwise bring a server to its knees. Users also have new, robust tools for management and reporting.

The security features have also improved. The administrator permissions are no longer required by the content crawler. This is a very important security feature that essentially allows the organization to have a higher security level that limits a search engine from crawling all the data within an organization. The access control list (ACL) and ACL-only crawl index content based on permissions set up by the organization to follow organization-specific compliance, privacy, and protection of intellectual property (IP). As a result, security-trimmed search results allow users to see only the content they are allowed to access.

Organizations create huge volumes of unstructured content. This content includes every flavor of document: Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, videos, web pages, XML, instant messages, and much more. Many companies still have public shares on a corporate server where users drop content on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the content typically goes unread because the data is either hard to find or users just do not know that it exists. Much of this problem is addressed with the Enterprise Search features in MOSS 2007, but the main task of organizing that content and sharing it with the organization is accomplished with the new Enterprise Content Management (ECM) feature.