SharePoint 2007 Improves Enterprise Search

SharePoint Server 2007 offers improved enterprise search capabilities, which enable search of resources on a network, such as intranet sites, file servers, and business applications. These capabilities and a new low-cost edition for search will help SharePoint Server compete with more expensive solutions from enterprise search specialists, such as Autonomy, as well as low-cost enterprise-search providers, such as Google and IBM/Yahoo. Lack of desktop search integration and a confusing array of licensing choices are sore points.

Microsoft’s Approach to Enterprise Search

Enterprise search tools help organizations (including small and midsize businesses—not just enterprises) find information in unstructured data sources, such as text documents and messaging systems, and in structured data sources, such as transactional databases, and business applications.

Although these tools often employ a user interface similar to Internet search tools (such as Google, Yahoo Search, and Microsoft’s Live Search), enterprise search involves some critical differences. Enterprise search tools deal with smaller volumes of data but must be able to understand more types of data (e.g., information in databases, or file formats that are uncommon on the Internet but that may be widely used within a particular organization), and must provide access control to ensure that information restricted to certain groups or management levels is not seen by all searchers. In addition, enterprise search tools rank results in a different way and give data owners some programmable control over those rankings.