Enterprise Search With SharePoint Portal Server V2 Steve Tullis, Program Manager, Business Portal Group 3/5/2003

Enterprise Search Challenge Search... It’s not just documents anymore: –Portals, team sites, file shares, , etc. –Inside collaborative applications –People and teams –Many portals: where do I look? Sparse/”dirty” metadata Secure access (file permissions, HTTPS) Scale -- Millions of items

Laying Groundwork in V1 SharePoint Portal Server is Microsoft’s flagship application for enterprise search –Securely aggregates data from multiple sources –Probabilistic relevance ranking –Alerts notify you of new relevant information –Automatic categorization –Adaptive crawling keeps search current –Best bet tagging

SharePoint V2 Advances SharePoint Portal Server V2 provides scalable search that discovers and organizes knowledge across the enterprise –Identifies people, teams and categories –Organizes and browses web sites –Enhanced, fast, easy to use search UI –Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) integration –Improved query performance and scalability –Extends support for secure content

Search Themes In SPS V2 Enterprise capabilities –Scale to large deployments –Shared portal services Relevant, rich results –Fast, easy-to-use / re-use search UI Organization of information –Site Directory –Best bet and metadata management Team site integration & Search Extensibility

Enterprise Capabilities Scalable Search Architecture

Enterprise Capabilities Performance and scalability goals –95% of queries in less than 2 seconds –Indexing to 20 million documents –Fast loading of large thesaurus files Availability and room for growth –Propagation to multiple search servers –Load balancing from web front-ends Indexing of HTTPS and local group ACLs IIS logging of portal query keywords

Large Farm Deployment Job Server Index Search … … Web … Propagate Load Balancing Portal Site DB ServicesDB

Scalable Search Architecture IndexingIndexing SearchSearch WebWeb PortalContentSalesProducts 1. Multiple indexing servers support up to 4 content indexes 1 2. Each index propagates to all search servers 2 3. Search requests are balanced across search servers Query 3 SalesProductsPortalContentSalesProductsPortalContent ServicesDB

Indexing Performance Scale indexing to large enterprise corpus –5M (v1) to 20M (v2) documents –Double indexing rate (docs/second) Propagation administration –Monitors multiple indexing and search servers –On-demand propagation

Portal Shared Services Share search, user profiles, personal pages from a central portal Central portal gathers and indexes content –Best bets managed centrally –Central and satellite site registries indexed –Automatic indexing of provisioned sites –Automatic scoping of associated portals Central portal imports and stores user profiles –Single personal page across the enterprise Central management of alerts

Relevant, Rich Results Enhanced Search Results

Investment in search results usability –Search results are fast, simple and powerful More than documents –People, Team Sites, and Topics –Reconciles people names and aliases –Pivot or link to document info, people, topic pages and team sites Easy to sort by site, topic, author, date –Collapse by site to see broad results

Keyword Best Bets Humans make search better –Keyword and topic best bets emphasize key results –Site administrators manage keyword hierarchy New keyword view lists all best bets –Portal users can suggest best bets IIS logging of query keywords allows tracking of frequent queries

Personal Search Experience Interactive portal search –“Alert me” when result changes –Suggest as best bet –Save searches Advanced, targeted search –Search over entire portal or selected scopes –Finer group, sort control –Boolean constraints

Organization of Information Tools for Site Owners

Organization of Information Site Directory organizes and indexes sites across the enterprise –Site Directory provides an organized view of key portals, team sites and web sites in the enterprise –Portal users can browse and explore enterprise sites –Promotes sites for indexing via admin request / approval Metadata discovery and management allows administrators to: –View discovered metadata –Drill to examples of indexed content –Enable/disable indexing/retrieval –Map custom metadata to search results Enterprise Scoping –Restrict searches to a subset of the portal –Auto-scoping of ‘associated’ portals

WSS Integration & Search Extensibility Working Better Together

Team Site Integration Automatic indexing of team sites Intelligent detection of team and portal sites Efficient indexing of team sites –Incremental, secure, fast Alerts for lists or list items –Integrated with Outlook alerts Team sites can share portal search Thumbnails for image libraries

SPS and WSS Search WSS inherent text search capabilities –SQL Server Full Text Search (CONTAINS) –Site specific –Optional promotion of queries to SPS when affiliated with an SPS portal SPS is the aggregator –Probabilistic Ranking (FREETEXT) –Richer UI –Multi-site / Scoping –Share Services

Search Extensibility.NET enabled Search –Managed-code query provider and admin API –Search web service for remote applications Simple keyword or full-text SQL support Customization of search web parts using Visual Studio.NET –Search results web part is used across many SPS V2 portal features Word breaker interface published in Platform SDK

Partner Opportunities Search Extensibility –Word breakers –Protocol Handlers –Filters IIS Log Mining –Best bet promotion

Summary SharePoint Portal Server V2 significantly boosts performance and scalability for enterprise search solutions Richness of search results and improved manageability –Portal users find relevant results, experts, teams and sites –Content owners organize enterprise information.NET web services enable development of custom search solutions