SharePoint Search How To
October 11, 2008
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to TechRepublic’s pointer to a Microsoft search how-to document. The Word file is 40 pages long, and you can start the download process (which is pretty annoying) here. Once you have signed up for a Microsoft sales professional to contact you or my colleague Tess the Boxer, you can read ” Deploying and Supporting Enterprise Search. Using SharePoint Server 2007 to Help Employees Locate Information and People at Microsoft.” The white paper was written in July 2007, not quite a year before Microsoft bought the outstanding search airplane kit, Fast Search & Transfer. The paper is blissfully unaware of Microsoft Office SharePoint Search, but you may find some interesting information in the white paper. In fact, I think I read this paper. I know I have used it as a source in my Microsoft Data Center Architecture lecture. Heck, I may have written a log post about it. Nevertheless, let me highlight a couple of gems from the document:
- Microsoft had indexed at the time the paper was written 27 million documents. With SharePoint search struggling when asked to index about 50 million documents, I wonder how Microsoft indexes its email. Microsoft’s employees must generate a significant volume of email, and I wonder if SharePoint processes this content or omits it. My guess is that Microsoft hopes Fast Search & Transfer can process documents collections that exceed SharePoint’s current ceiling. See page 19 for what Microsoft indexed in May 2007.
- Search when this paper was written did not permit a query across all content in SharePoint installations in world wide Microsoft. My guess is that federating search across SharePoint servers is too expensive and compute intensive even for Microsoft. See pages 13-15 for more information about the Microsoft implementation of SharePoint.
- The administrative task summary is remarkable, comprising the bulk of the document. These tasks remind me to get a notebook, write down what was done, make screenshots, print them out, paste them in the notebook, and keep it handy.
The search interface in May 2007. I don’t know what I am looking at or what I am supposed to be seeing.
If you are a SharePoint engineer, you may want to download this paper. Put it in your configuration notebook. It may come in handy.
Stephen Arnold, October 11, 2008
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