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Why Choose Microsoft for Enterprise Search?

  • Artigo

There are a number of companies that play in the Enterprise Search space. I wrote a blog posting a few months ago on Microsoft Enterprise Search. For those of you who missed it, take a look here.

So why is Microsoft the best option for Enterprise Search? For starters, Microsoft is investing heavily in the space across the board: SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Windows Desktop Search, as well as a number of other products that use the same full-text search engine that SPS and WDS use. SPS 2003 and WDS provide a great comprehensive solution today. SPS gives administrators the right tools to setup search as well as provide portal functionality. WDS comes with management and deployment tools to deploy across an Enterprise. With the right group policies, you can provide WDS and SPS 2003 search integration.

Microsoft's search technologies have a number of advantages over other vendors today. For starters, SPS is proven technology with thousands of customers. It provides security trimming, great relevance, exposes a web service to expose search as a service, an API and provides simple/advanced search features. SPS crawls public folders, websites, SharePoint sites, exchange PFs and Lotus Notes DBs out of the box with a strong extensibility model for other repositories. WDS, for desktop search, has won numerous awards and gained a lot of  recognition --- as a component of Windows, it's supported and it's free if you have Windows.

What really excites me, however, is what's coming in the next version of search in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Relevance is greatly improved and tuned for the Enterprise; User Experience is enhanced and can be easily customized; intelligent People search is out of the box; my favorite feature, however, is the ability to search Line of Business applications with the new Business Data Catalog feature. You can search business data in LOB apps and databases. This is a core differentiator, and in my opinion, is what Enterprise Search is all about. It's about finding the right information or person while you work irrespective of where the information is - in email, on a file share, in a workspace, in a database or LOB application.

So if you're looking at Enterprise Search for your organization, I highly recommend checking out SPS 2003 today and Office SharePoint Server 2007 when the public beta is released. It really is going to revolutionize the way content is surfaced to Information Workers... Office SharePoint Server 2007 has the additional benefit of providing strong document management and records management features as well as metadata management taking advantage of the features in Windows SharePoint Services "v3".

A customer recently made a comment to me "making the content in a CRM system is going to expose possibly old data". I smiled when I heard that... b/c if the data is old, then if anything, this will make people more accountable since it will be seen/viewed more. And if the data is really old, what use is the CRM system? The customer thought for exactly 2 seconds and said about their own environment: "ahhhh... we'll know exactly how useful the information is in these LOB systems after all!"

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2006
    Arpan,

    The one thing I would add to your post which is another key difference between Microsoft's Enterprise Search offering and others is the large ecosystem of partners supporting and extending Microsoft products.

    Cheers!
  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2006
    Arpan,

    Is the SharePoint 2007 search going to be considerably more scalable than that on 2003?  In a solution with more than a million documents SharePoint Portal search just isn't up to the job!
  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2006
    Arpan,

    good article on Search choice, and on 2007 preview.

    Simon - the response of Sharepoint for that amount of documents depends on the architecture defined. You probably need to rethink the farm of servers, specially the Search Server.
  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2006
    I wrote a short article about Microsoft Enterprise Search a little while ago. Now that there have been...
  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2006
    I just wanted to make sure that folks are aware of some blog postings and links/whitepapers that Microsoft
  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2007
    I just wanted to make sure that folks are aware of some blog postings and links/whitepapers that Microsoft