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Re-Architecting Search Solutions with SharePoint’s new Federation Features. ITP314, CIO314, PM314, IA314. Wes Preston MCTS Inetium www.inetium.com [email protected] Wes is a SharePoint consultant and organizes the Minnesota SharePoint User Group (~150 attendees/month ) - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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Re-Architecting Search Solutions with SharePoint’s new Federation
FeaturesITP314, CIO314, PM314, IA314
Wes Preston MCTS Inetium www.inetium.com [email protected] Wes is a SharePoint consultant and
organizes the Minnesota SharePoint User Group (~150 attendees/month)
http://www.idubbs.com/blog
Abstract Microsoft introduced federated search
functionality as part of Search Server 2008 and as an updated feature set for MOSS. Learn why these features change design strategies for SharePoint topologies and understand the reasons why you may want to revisit how search is deployed in your environment.
Agenda 1. What new search features are offered by
Microsoft Search Server 2008 and included in the MOSS ‘Infrastructure release’.
2. What is Federated Search and how does it fit in with other SharePoint Search solutions and topologies.
3. The advantages of new search topology designs over current topologies.
What’s New Products and Updates
MOSS update Search Server 2008 Search Server Express 2008
Functionality Federated Search New Administration and Reporting
Federated Search Wikipedia:
Federated search is the simultaneous search of multiple online databases
Search is HUGE – Why… Findability is a critical part of the user
experience. Product offerings from Microsoft continue
to improve because of search’s importance in the workplace
There is a LOT that can be configured out of the box, even more that can be customized
Search is HUGE – How… Content sources Scopes Crawled and Managed
Properties Audiences Best Bets Thesaurus and Noise
files Search pages, Results
pages, advanced search pages
XML configured search results
SSPs Crawl schedules More… And now - Federation
Best Practice #1
With a WSS only farm, install Search Server Express to allow for cross site searching
Why? With WSS only, users can search the existing site and all sub
webs – SSE goes across site collections. SSE adds enterprise search functionality: Scopes, best bets,
etc… Allow for broad search across site collections Better administration and control No additional software/licensing cost
Best Practice #1
Trade-offs: Additional effort to build and maintain multiple farms There will likely be more search results for each searched topic
Additional thoughts: There are a number of ways to implement – find the one that is
right for your particular needs to be successful Integrate into WSS. Replace the WSS search functionality with
SSE functionality. Add SSE to the environment as a stand-alone search offering
with WSS as just one of a number of content sources. Become a federated source for other searches
Best Practices #2
Don’t crawl across the WAN (with a ‘small’ pipe).
Why? Reduces the load on the WAN pipe/bandwidth
– Crawls may be affecting the performance of other applications Faster crawls Allows for increased frequency of search and query updates
Trade-offs: Additional effort to build and maintain multiple farms Lose the ability to merge results between core and federated
result sets.
Best Practice #2
Additional thoughts If you can mitigate the limitations of crawling across
the WAN, it may still be worthwhile– Not crawling too much or too often– As MS does with their farms today, you can tweak the
content crawling schedules and frequencies– If you’ve got a WAN that’s fast enough to maintain crawls
and searches while not negatively impacting other WAN usage, you may be ok to continue down the traditional route. Be sure to plan for growth.
Be sure to monitor both full crawls and incremental crawls.
Best Practice #3
Dedicate search servers to business-specific content sources when appropriate
Why? To accommodate large volumes of data, constant changes, and
a need for up to date results Crawls can take a lot of time. Isolating a content source allows
the indexer to focus on the one solution. There might not be a lot of changes for each incremental crawl, but they can be updated and propagated more quickly.
– Faster crawls– Allows for increased frequency of search and query updates
Best Practice #3
Trade-offs: Additional effort to build and maintain multiple farms Lose the ability to merge results between core and federated
result sets.
Additional thoughts: Maybe this is more of a specific use-case solution than it is a
best practice, but I want to get across that there will and can be requirements for extreme configurations that SharePoint can meet.
This is one of the tougher best practices to nail down specifics on because it goes hand-in-hand with taxonomy planning - aligning with business data and usage.
Best Practice #3
Additional thoughts: While results from the isolated content source won’t be
integrated into a merged result set, it can still be exposed via federation and then drilled down into via the focused search
Best Practice #4
Governance: Train and inform users about search functionality and changes.
Why? Users are more productive Because this keeps your users and stakeholders happy.
Trade-offs: Effort to create and distribute the information to users
Best Practice #4
Additional thoughts: The effort to create and distribute information preemptively
should be a significantly less than the time required to respond to the questions and issues that will arise if the information is not shared.
There should already be one or more methods in place for news and training
– Internal training and user group sites– SharePoint Portal Training kit
Worst Practices
Don’t index the same content from more than one Search server - avoid cross-over search and multiple results Indexing the same content more than once eats up processor
time, SQL access bandwidth, LAN bandwidth, and storage space.
Don’t use too many federated search results web parts and/or sources SharePoint 2007 Best Practices book recommends no more
than 10 Federated web parts per page…
Worst Practices
Don’t over isolate – don’t use separate search servers for content sources if they are not needed (e.g. – one server for each file share, etc…)
Don’t crawl so much data that the crawler can’t finish before it’s scheduled to start the crawl again
References
Federated Search overview http://blogs.technet.com/tothesharepoint/archive/2008/07/18/3090988.aspx
Plan for global enterprise searchhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262205.aspx
Best Practices for Search in Office SharePoint Serverhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc850696.aspx
Plan the end-user search experiencehttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb905371.aspx
New Book! Microsoft Search
SharePoint 2007 and Search Server 2008
Thank you for attending!
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