Re-Architecting Search Solutions with SharePoint’s new Federation

FeaturesITP314, CIO314, PM314, IA314

Wes Preston MCTS Inetium www.inetium.com wes@idubbs.com 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

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