This is the last article in the four part article series. If you have missed reading the previous post, read it here:

What's new in Sharepoint 2007 - Part I
What's new in Sharepoint 2007 - Part II
What's new in Sharepoint 2007 - Product offering, Part III

Search

Search arena has been transformed to such a great degree in the last five years, now it became absolutely essential for any product that deals with content at enterprise level to provide high quality and integrated search experience to its users. One of the main concerns organizations have is to lower the time of searching for the content, and get relevant results within milliseconds, other thing like search refinement and intelligence is also demanded. Search is really a big
improvement in current release of MOSS from both architecture and development prospective. In fact if we take a close look it’s a much bigger vision from Microsoft, you can find Microsoft Live Search for internet and Microsoft Search Server 2008 for enterprise search and it’s a clear statement from them as they are now entering in the territory that is vastly occupied by other vendors. With MOSS you can also search for people in your organization, this is one the most commonly used search feature in large organizations, this enable quickly access the person (e.g. via email etc).



MOSS comes with number of options when it comes to search, like crawling for websites (both MOSS and standard web sites), Lotus Notes, Exchange Folders and File shares just to name a few (See figure 2.6). In fact MOSS comes with powerful feature called “Business Data Catalog (BDC)”, which allows searching on number of miscellaneous data sources as you can think of, for e.g. you can now crawl data stored in oracle data base. Technically you can search anything, if there is a protocol handler and IFilter (think of them as driver to connect, and read data from data sources) available for it. 



One of the most often complain from the developers  is the limited amount of freedom they have when  dealing with SharePoint 2003 Search , now this is changed and developers, can in fact to much more than even possible from GUI alone. However there are still some areas that are not open enough, to get the best out of search. For example the internals of Relevance Algorithm used for search are not provided, which somewhat limit developers, in certain advance search development scenarios.

Some of you might already be aware, that Microsoft acquires another search product named FAST ESP, which was originally developed by Norway based company. FAST ESP is much more mature, and comes with advance capabilities like video indexing, smart classification, etc. FAST ESP provides MOSS connector which enables user to use SharePoint to perform search on FAST ESP, but this requires considerable customization. Future releases of FAST ESP will allow better and tight integration with MOSS.MOSS search architecture requires careful planning, as you need to properly calculate the size of data that MOSS has to crawl, keep in mind that one of the most resource intensive tasks is crawling on content. This can quickly become a performance bottleneck and choke the whole system. You can imagine the user response if he/she has to wait 10 seconds after entering the search query to get the result. Other important thing to keep in mind is relevance, its most important that  users should able to find what they are looking for in the first 3 to 5 links , each time users clicks a link and ends up with a result that is not what user expected, to them it’s a  poor quality search and they might not even search again, hence lowering the effectiveness and usefulness of whole portal.There are features like Best Bets, Thesauruses to help enrich the overall search experience for the users.

Search in MOSS is one the area the needs good bit of attention by both administrators and developers, mostly because of new concepts that are added to it. Future articles will cover details of all major aspects of search like architecture, planning, designing and customization of search. We will also take a look at how the MOSS and Search Server 2008 can be used together to get an optimal search solution for an organization.

What MOSS is not

Though MOSS provides plethora of features OTB (out of the box), and through development almost infinite amount of flexibility can be achieved but there will be times when MOSS might not be right or the good enough feasible solution to the problem you are dealing with.You should also be aware of bottlenecks and limitations
of MOSS. However said so in certain cases, with the help of Microsoft Partner / 3^rd party products, you can achieve things that may be initially considered out of scope for MOSS. Following are some of the areas, which you need to watch out before going forward with MOSS.


MOSS as Document File Server

MOSS main source for storing documents are document libraries, you can think document libraries as a windows folder, with major difference that they store document(s) inside database, rather than file system. In majority of cases document library is enough for holding companies documents and content, but there are limits to what extend document library can support the storage, until performance

The Key is to make your priorities clear, and if you are convinced enough, that you can invest both time and money, in an architecture and design of system, such that it can take that much of a load, only then you should proceed further. In cases where it  is absolutely necessary  then you need to plan for substantial hardware and Microsoft partner / 3^rd Party software’s  to design an architecture. Off course for such a maneuver you will require specialized subject matter experts. Before proceeding take a look at Microsoft article titled SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper . This white paper shows architecture, design and performance characteristics of a real world MOSS implementation containing 40 TB of content.

MOSS as BPM Solution

As mentioned in section on Business Process, MOSS provides basic workflows to model business process, but in most cases where organizations are looking for complete BPM solution, MOSS OTB features alone cannot fulfill this requirement. Either you can chose to customdevelop the BPM on top of MOSS or use Microsoft Partner / 3^rd Party products to achieve this goal. MOSS can be excellent enabler for BPM but certainly not the end of story; some Microsoft Partners like K2 provides excellent BPM features that integrate seamlessly with MOSS. You should conduct a proper research before moving towards BPM with MOSS. To get an idea about K2.Net visit www.k2.com   

Conclusion

In this series of articles, we had taken a quick overview of major functional areas of MOSS, including Portal, collaboration, Enterprise Content Management, Search, Business Intelligence and Business Process.  This provides us with big picture, before delve into the technical details of each of those areas. We also touched areas where feasibility of using MOSS should be evaluated first as we should remember that MOSS is no silver bullet.

What's Next

With basic understanding of landscape of MOSS, we are now ready to dive deep inside MOSS. The next logical thing is to take a look at MOSS architecture, and see how the components work together, and what technologies they use. There is whole new world of excited stuff when it comes to MOSS, and hopefully the future articles will help you get better understanding of MOSS. They will equip you with right knowledge to start working on MOSS projects. Microsoft provides free of cost download, of a virtual machine which have MOSS completely installed, and basic configuration done for you. 

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