Chapter 6
Search
What's in this chapter?
- Profiling the corpus
- Understanding scalable search solutions
- Designing a scalable search architecture
- Monitoring and tuning search performance
In many ways, search is one of the most important subsystems in any ECM platform. Even the best content storage and management solution is useless if end users can't reliably locate the right content at the right time. Unfortunately, it can be a difficult task to get users to move away from the tried-and-true method of hierarchy-based folder navigation toward using the search center or other powerful search tools.
This chapter dives into the underlying technology and search concepts that enable end users to locate and retrieve ECM content consistently and reliably. It also discusses the functional components of SharePoint Enterprise Search and FAST for SharePoint 2010 as a foundation for architecting a scalable search solution that will drive user adoption. Finally, sample search topology architectures are identified, along with the performance factors that drive them.
Introduction
It doesn't matter whether SharePoint is being used as a public-facing portal driven by content management, a collaboration portal driven by organization employees, or a document and records management system driven by regulatory compliance policies; the system's ability to crawl, index, and return query results in an accurate and efficient manner is always a core requirement.
It's pointless to implement a highly scalable ...
