The New Microsoft Search Landscape

2009 and 2010 will be remembered as the time when the words "search" and "Microsoft" became closely associated in the minds of enterprise technology customers, vendors, and developers. In addition to the consumer-facing splash Microsoft has achieved with the innovative Bing, Microsoft has also been making major investments in its search offerings to businesses, government entities, and non-profits--both through internal R&D and a key acquisition. In this post, I will briefly describe the powerful search offerings from Microsoft already in current release. Soon, in a follow up post I will add to this picture based on the news that emerges from the 2009 Microsoft SharePoint Conference, where several SharePoint- and search-related product announcements are expected.

For the purposes of discussion, we are going to focus on two axes: where you need search power and how much search power you need.

There are four basic scenarios for where search capabilities are located: internet, intranet, extranet, and specialized applications.

Internet - search capabilities on public internet sites are generally aimed at end users and consumers; organizations investing in search technology for their internet properties would like to accomplish things such as increasing the average length of site visits, reducing the need to leave the site to use an external search engine, increasing user satisfaction, increasing page views, increasing average order value, and decreasing abandoned shopping carts
Intranet - search capabilities on intranet sites are typically aimed at helping internal employees find the information they need faster and more precisely--which can be a daunting challenge given the huge repositories of "unstructured" data companies have accumulated in email, documents, and web pages; in certain research-intensive business scenarios, as well as less routine scenarios such as responding to e-discovery requirements during litigation, speeding up and improving search capabilities can have a huge impact
Extranet - the requirements for search in an extranet--which is usually provided for an audience of customers, suppliers, and/or partners--are often a hybrid of internet and extranet scenarios; that is, sometimes there are large information repositories (such as support knowledge bases) that partners may need to access, similar to many intranet scenarios, and sometimes there are ways that search technology can be used to "push" product suggestions and alternatives to end users, similar to an internet e-commerce scenario
Specialized Applications - search is now a platform, which means that search is not always about a user sitting in front of a search form and looking through a list of results; an advanced search technology can turn unstructured information into structured data; since search derives structure and meaning from blobs of information (usually text), new structure and insight is not designed in advance, it emerges dynamically; intelligent, advanced search capabilities can power an entirely new class of application

Correspondingly, there are three levels of need covered by Microsoft offerings: basic (not using SharePoint), intermediate (using SharePoint), and advanced (with or without SharePoint).

Basic (not using SharePoint) - Microsoft's offering for "entry level" enterprise search needs is called Search Server 2008 Express; this product is available as a free download from Microsoft; if you are not using SharePoint, and if your needs are modest, you can't beat free; Microsoft says that this solution is appropriate when, "Speed and ease of implementation are more important than scale and sophistication of the solution" and when, "You want a risk-free opportunity to experiment with enterprise search on a limited scale."
Intermediate (using SharePoint) - SharePoint search can come into play in internet, intranet, and extranet scenarios--and because of the Business Data Catalog feature, what SharePoint can search does not need to be stored in SharePoint; administrators have a good deal of control over what content is indexed (and how often) and some search features can be customized, including how results are presented
Advanced (with or without SharePoint) - the primary technology here is FAST, an advanced search technology originally developed by FAST Search & Transfer ASA of Norway, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft; as Microsoft describes, FAST is a "scalable and customizable best-in-class enterprise search platform"; it has incredible amount of indexing and querying power that can be applied for bottom-line savings in large scale intranet scenarios (think e-discovery requirements that can cost millions of dollars to fulfill) and for driving top-line revenue in internet scenarios by enabling "revenue-generating user experiences through high-end search, recommendations, advertising, and merchandising"; in future posts we will describe FAST and its business value in much more detail

Putting these axes together into a matrix looks something like this:

	Basic (not using SharePoint)	Intermediate (using SharePoint)	Advanced (with or without SharePoint
Internet	Search Server 2008 Express	Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007	FAST & FAST AdMomentum
Intranet	Search Server 2008 Express	WSS 3 / Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007	FAST ESP
Extranet	Search Server 2008 Express	Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007	FAST ESP
Specialized Applications	N/A	If application based on MOSS 2007	FAST ESP

This post only scratches the surface of the complex topic of Microsoft Search. In future posts, we will drill into the FAST and SharePoint search capabilities, including a discussion of various business scenarios that call for the advanced capabilities of FAST. In the meantime, if you would like to speak with Northridge search and application development experts about these topics, be sure to reach out. Thanks for reading.

Trackback Url