In my fifth posting about my attendance at the Microsoft Ignite event on SharePoint 2010, I discuss the material on Enterprise Search and Content Management.
I like search, and when it is implemented properly it makes a huge difference to users in their day to day business. I’ve had a personal fascination through the years with the whole process of finding things to search, opening them up, breaking them apart and indexing them and then storing this in a way that is useful to people trying to get on with their jobs. SharePoint 2010 improves both the user experience and the administration and management of the underlying search infrastructure, and also marks the next stage in the integration of the functionality from FAST.
The other area of Enterprise Content Management is also of interest, though I must admit to a bit of a bias towards Web Content Management as this has been another area that I have worked in for a long time, but SharePoint traditionally bundles all types of content under a common banner.
Enterprise Search - SharePoint
A whole lot of material has already been covered this week at the SharePoint 2010 Ignite event and as the week progresses I have been using the agenda published to attendees to create a mental outline of what are currently seen as the important areas. As you would expect the format is presentation – break – presentation – lunch and so on, with presentations followed by hands-on-labs for the attendees, as it is an instructional event. Search has three sessions devoted to it which is more or less three quarters of the penultimate day. Whatever you read in to this I take it to mean that Search is important and enough is changing in it that needs time to cover.
Of course one of the other reasons for the subject matter’s relative size is the progressive incorporation of the product line from the FAST search company that Microsoft acquired last year. This is another option on the list that starts at the bottom in basic search with SharePoint 2010 Foundation and works up in capability, flexibility, connection and language support in FAST.
I’m pleased to say that the length allocated reflected two aspects that have changed in the SharePoint search landscape, the architecture (certainly in the most part) now incorporates the capability to scale out for performance, but also incorporates resilience in the ability to hand off processing in the event of the loss of a processing unit (my term). Other tweaks also help with this, for instance we still have crawl servers but as soon as they can the index material is persisted to database, meaning that the dependence on a particular crawl/index server is reduced.
The general concepts to search are still there in that content sources are crawled, the material there is taken apart and indexed and then collected together for querying. What has happened to this is that individual elements can be split between separate servers for performance, or parts can be mirrored so that the loss of one does not remove service. A set of crawling machines can be allocated items to crawl into one or more databases, again split for performance or resilience reasons.
What this allows us to do is implement search and add to the overall infrastructure as users capitalise on the facility more and more, if content needs to be more up to date then the machinery at the crawling and index end of things can be expanded. If query performance is suffering then query servers can be added to and indexes partitioned to spread the load.
And all of this is behind the scenes, there have also been a number of additions to the user experience of searching that provides for more tailoring by developers (technically the web parts are no longer sealed), more things to search and new ideas about supporting collaboration.
All in all this means that SharePoint 2010 has a huge amount to offer to Enterprise search and I think goes a lot of the way to support the way that I think people should work. Structure is fine and correct, but there is so much material out there being generated that a search tool is essential for reducing the time spent to find documents, but also to help employees find the material that they may have not found before.
Enterprise Search – FAST for SharePoint
The top of the tree in terms of Microsoft Enterprise Search is FAST. It has retained its name since the product was taken in to Microsoft, but with this release we see a higher level of integration with SharePoint 2010. The overall architecture is similar to SharePoint search but what it does with content indexing goes way beyond what SharePoint can do natively, and then from there it also scales higher and also offers considerably more customisation options for results management.
My impression is that FAST is the product for organisations who are very serious about search as a tool for their organisations and the fine tuning that is possible throughout the product is impressive and gives the impression that it would be the tool of a dedicated team rather than someone in IT switching it on in SharePoint.
Enterprise Content Management
You may have noticed a couple of the enterprise site templates in MOSS called the Document Center and Records Center. These are underused facilities for the management of enterprise content – making sure that items are tracked, stored and archived properly. And this is all out of the box. SharePoint 2010 extends these facilities and I would recommend looking at these again if you did not feel that the document management facilities of MOSS 2007 were strong enough, it could be that they are now.
The other area delved into under this banner was that of metatagging, taxonomy and a new term to me “folksonomy”. The truth is that users do classify documents out there but do not necessarily embrace the structure imposed by company librarians. As ever real world experience suggests that this is down to the perennial problem of over engineering and lack of communication. Again if you do not think that MOSS 2007 had what you needed, or you have tried to implement managed terms and you don’t think it worked – please take a look at it again in the context of SharePoint 2010.
Conclusion
For me the enhancements to search are a major step forward for SharePoint and go beyond the sort and fix that we see in some of the other areas of functionality. Certainly from an infrastructure and performance perspective it is there, but the key question is whether or not it has the right amount of tuning potential that you require. I am certain that from a functional perspective FAST will tick all of the boxes, but my concern (as with SharePoint editions) is whether your business case is sound for the expenditure on FAST.
Enterprise Content Management is not the most exciting of subjects, but demands serious consideration as the more formal aspect of introducing documents into a system to then be filed, found, and managed.