Enterprise Search With SharePoint Portal Server V2

Steve Tullis, Program Manager, Business Portal Group3/5/2003

Enterprise Search Challenge

• Search . . . It’s not just documents anymore:– Portals, team sites, file shares, email, 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

ServerIndex Index

Search Search …

…

Web Web Web Web Web Web Web …

Propagate

Load Balancing

PortalPortalSite DBSite DB

ServicesServicesDBDB

Scalable Search Architecture

IndexingIndexing IndexingIndexing

SearchSearch SearchSearch

WebWeb WebWeb

Portal Portal ContentContent SalesSales ProductsProducts

1. Multiple 1. Multiple indexing servers indexing servers support up to 4 support up to 4 content indexescontent indexes

11

2. Each index 2. Each index propagates to all propagates to all search serverssearch servers

22

3. Search 3. Search requests are requests are balanced across balanced across search serverssearch servers

QueryQuery 33

SalesSalesProductsProductsPortalPortalContentContent SalesSalesProductsProductsPortalPortal

ContentContent

ServicesServicesDBDB

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

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