With the explosion of digitally borne information in the workplace, Enterprise Search has become more critical than ever... more

With the explosion of digitally borne information in the workplace, Enterprise Search has become more critical than ever before. Gone are the days when you could remember the location of all the file shares, web sites, and SharePoint sites where the information you needed was stored. Instead, sites with terabytes of data are normal now, rather than being the anomaly they were just a few years ago. Remembering where you stored something last year, or even last week, has become an exercise in searching for a needle in a haystack. Also, with the growth of Internet Search, companies have begun to question why they do not have as good a search engine inside the firewall as they do outside the firewall. Internal customers are demanding that you provide a robust, scalable infrastructure for them to search against and provide in return relevant and timely results. Not a short order in any way, but reading this book will help!

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Microsoft has been in the Enterprise Search business for a long time—does anyone remember Index Server and Site Server? Over... more

Microsoft has been in the Enterprise Search business for a long time—does anyone remember Index Server and Site Server? Over the years, the Microsoft product line has changed, with the different products evolving and new products being added. When it comes to Enterprise Search, the primary Microsoft products you will deal with are SharePoint and the Windows Desktop Search (WDS) technologies. For completeness though, we will talk about some of the other products that you may encounter when deciding how to build out your Enterprise Search strategy and infrastructure. This includes products such as Live Search and the individual full-text technologies built into Microsoft server products including SQL Server and Exchange Server.

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Are you excited? You should be. If you are reading this chapter, that means you are preparing to deploy the greatest Enterprise... more

Are you excited? You should be. If you are reading this chapter, that means you are preparing to deploy the greatest Enterprise Search platform yet built (in these authors’ humble opinions). Perhaps you have already deployed Search? You are still in luck; this chapter has some powerful information on optimization and monitoring.

This chapter will dive into the underpinnings of Search to reveal what makes it so powerful and how to make it run like a high-performance sports car. We start with the foundation of the key components of Search and an explanation of how to allocate those items to various servers to achieve scale and high availability. You will walk through hardware sizing and storage space requirements for the physical servers. Once you have all of the pieces put together, you are ready to use some disk optimization techniques and performance counters to find bottlenecks. Finally, you’ll take a quick trip through backup/restore considerations as they pertain to the search components.

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Before you can take advantage of the awesome power of SharePoint Search, you first need to turn all of the knobs and switches... more

Before you can take advantage of the awesome power of SharePoint Search, you first need to turn all of the knobs and switches the right way to make it work. For some administrators, this will be as simple as enabling the server roles for indexing and querying, specifying the accounts under which the services run, creating a Shared Services Provider (SSP), and finally making sure that the administrators have scheduled the indexing of their content. Just a couple of simple steps and Search is up and running. While that is great, and it speaks highly of the product that you can make Search function work so easily, most administrators will need to look deeper. This chapter will cover all of the special features you can use to dial in Search behavior and performance.

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With previous versions of SharePoint, connecting to, utilizing, and searching systems for which SharePoint did not ship protocol... more

With previous versions of SharePoint, connecting to, utilizing, and searching systems for which SharePoint did not ship protocol handlers was very hard. You either had to write custom web parts, write custom protocol handlers, build a web application front end, and crawl that or do some combination of all three. Many times the systems you wanted to crawl, but had to write custom components for, were structured systems, such as databases, or line-of-business systems, such as SAP or Siebel. The goal was to bring together your unstructured data and your structured data to make it easier for your end users to be able to search for their information regardless of where it resides.

With the introduction of SharePoint 2007, the process of connecting to non-SharePoint systems has been made much easier with the new Business Data Catalog (BDC). The BDC is a metadata mapping and system registry system that allows you to describe how to connect to your systems, the security involved, and the correct ways to get data. Once the systems are registered, SharePoint can either pull data directly from the system into SharePoint lists, the BDC web parts, or user profiles, or it can index and search the data. This chapter will step you through the architecture of the BDC, how to connect it to your systems, how to use the systems in SharePoint, and how to write programs that use the BDC object model.

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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SharePoint Server provides the capability to share information easily about users... more

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SharePoint Server provides the capability to share information easily about users, their work, and their expertise. Information sharing improves collaboration and helps solve business problems by delivering the right information at the right time. User information is imported into SharePoint from Active Directory, an LDAP directory service, or any line-of-business (LOB) application, through the use of the Business Data Catalog (BDC) feature in SharePoint Server. This content is stored inside a SQL Server database and is accessible through the user profile. The user profile is governed by security policies which define who can see what information. SharePoint Server search utilizes the user profile information to supplement the search experience to provide people search capability. We will begin the chapter with a discussion of the details and features of user profiles and then progress to using the profile information from inside of people search. We will also show how people search can be extended by adding custom profile properties to the query and results portions of the search process.

User profiles and people search are not available in Search Server and the Business Data Catalog feature of SharePoint Server is only available with the Enterprise Client Access License.

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Being able to crawl and index content is a core feature of any search engine. SharePoint ships with several indexing connectors... more

Being able to crawl and index content is a core feature of any search engine. SharePoint ships with several indexing connectors out of the box that enable it to connect not only to Microsoft content repositories, such as Microsoft Exchange Public Folders and Windows NTFS file shares but also to non-Microsoft repositories such as Lotus Notes, Documentum, FileNet, Web Sites, Structured Data, and others.

Indexing content is a required function for virtually every Enterprise Search implementation; after all, you need to index all of your content in order for your users to find it, right? Well, while that statement is only partially true; it’s not the full story.

When SharePoint Server shipped, the search functionality required that you create content sources to crawl and index your data in order for it to be returned in search results. This was the only way to get results in front of users (aside from writing custom web parts or controls that returned results from sources other than the local index), so you were effectively tied to the process of pulling your data across the wire, indexing it, writing it to the index on the index server, and managing security.

This changed for the better when Search Server 2008 was released. Search Server 2008 shipped with a new set of features focused on the ability to send a user query to multiple index stores (including the SharePoint Server or Search Server local index) and then to federate the results in the Search Center UI. This new feature set opened up a new approach to making results from certain types of repositories available through search in a more efficient and user-friendly way.

In this chapter, we will cover the federation features in detail, including what the federation framework looks like, how to configure and customize a Federated Location, what the new Federation web parts do and how you can configure them.

Note: The federation features found in Search Server are also available in SharePoint Server through the Infrastructure update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297),which can be downloaded from downloads.microsoft.com. The federation features will also be included in SharePoint Server Service Pack 2. The federation feature set is identical for Search Server and SharePoint Server after the Infrastructure update has been applied.

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Security is an important part of any Enterprise Search system. Since most indexing engines run as super users in your environment... more

Security is an important part of any Enterprise Search system. Since most indexing engines run as super users in your environment, giving them access to all content, you want to make sure that the search engine is returning only results that the user making the query would have permissions to, rather than all results. For example, you do not want the Excel spreadsheet with everyone’s Social Security number and salary information being returned to unauthorized users. Many companies, when they implement SharePoint for Search, suddenly discover all the sites that users are not correctly locking down from a security standpoint. SharePoint is not only a great search engine but it is also a great way to uncover bad security in your environment (wink, wink)!

In this chapter, you will take a look at four key areas. First, you will look at the default security architecture for SharePoint and how the crawler and query engine work together to provide security for some datasources. Second, you will look at forms-based authentication, and writing your own security trimmer for the times when the OOB security trimmer does not meet your needs. Third, you will look at the security architecture provided by the Business Data Catalog (BDC). Finally, you will take a quick look at securing the search service in SharePoint.

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Search is all about presenting relevant results in a compelling user interface. To do this, you need a rich index and query... more

Search is all about presenting relevant results in a compelling user interface. To do this, you need a rich index and query engine and a complementary rich and extensible user experience to present results. SharePoint provides an out-of-the-box search result experience through the use of web parts that work together and are customizable. By breaking the user interface into a number of different web parts, you can quickly change the user’s search experience whenever you need to. Plus, you can add your own new web parts to the search experience based on your business needs. This chapter will step you through the search experience in SharePoint and how to customize that experience.

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There are multiple factors that contribute to users’ satisfaction with a search engine. These include precision... more

There are multiple factors that contribute to users’ satisfaction with a search engine. These include precision (they find the right answers), recall (they find all the answers), search site layout and branding (how easy it is to use), and the speed with which results are returned. The most important factor, however, is relevance.

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While there are many rich applications you can build out of the box with SharePoint Enterprise Search, there are times when... more

While there are many rich applications you can build out of the box with SharePoint Enterprise Search, there are times when you will want to automate, extend, or customize the search experience and services with your own code or applications. SharePoint provides a rich platform to do this both for administrative tasks and Enterprise Search usage. The platform is provided both as a .NET object model that you can call on the server side and as a remote API (or off-the-server machine) via standard web services interfaces. Using the platform, you can create new content sources, work with schema, perform searches, customize search results, and customize many functions that your applications require. This chapter will step you through how to leverage the platform programming pieces of Search inside of your own applications.

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