A critical evaluation of MOSS search

Linguistic features are equally sparse: Microsoft can stem queries using the same modules that break words (define the beginning and end of a word, which can be hard with non-Western languages) at index time. Befitting a global player, though, the modules are available in 51 languages and variants, which is an amount few products will match.

Presentation

Both SharePoint for Search and MOSS 2007 (but not WSS) come with the "Search Center," a kind of configurable search results interface. For SharePoint, Microsoft has added an editor, which is derived from the earlier FrontPage product. It will allow you to easily change the appearance of the pages using WYSIWYG editor, and you can add in "Web Parts" (the Microsoft equivalent of portlets, small boxes with specific functionality in a page) for search.

You don’t, however, need to run SharePoint search to be able to use Web Parts for presentation--many vendors will gladly supply you with Web Parts to integrate their own search engine. This means that now not only the traditionally Microsoft-oriented vendors--Coveo, Mondosoft and dtSearch--will be easy to integrate in your implementation, but also the likes of Autonomy and FAST.

Since MOSS 2007 is more than a search engine--it tries to be the end-all, be-all environment for all your collaboration, publishing and interaction needs--much of the default search navigation pivots off metadata. The result is perhaps most like what Recommind does for legal search, revolving around people and organizational units. The main difference is that Recommind augments that with entities extracted from the unstructured text. Microsoft, on the other hand, can more safely rely on the tight integration with its platform, using both metadata and directory service information. Coupling that with other information sources from the Business Data Catalog could enable you to build a highly customized, people-centric interface.

In the end, remember that, although Redmond now officially eschews the term, SharePoint is fundamentally a portal product. So by default, it wants to build portal-like interfaces. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but not every search scenario lends itself to a card deck-like, control panel results page. You can, of course, modify the default pages, but it will take some tweaking. Contrast this with most other search systems that natively generate presentations that look and behave like, well, Web pages.

The almost limitless customization options in MOSS present two important challenges. First, it requires a strong sense of what you want to accomplish, and, second, it will almost certainly require development of components and integrating scripts to piece everything together.

Administrative services and reporting

SharePoint offers administrative Web interfaces for most high-level configuration, but administrators will find they’ll have to go back and forth between the interfaces of supporting (operating system) modules as well. For administrators closely following the teachings of Redmond, that will be a familiar process, but the occasional command line or even registry-editing action might provide a bit of a hurdle for the novice. If an integrator performs the implementation for you, however, you will probably be able to safely stay away from complicated forays into the depths of the infrastructure. However, the ability of the developers to foolproof their work becomes of great importance if you want to stick to the more polished controls of the administrative pages. Configuration management problems can result when you mix low-level coding and Web-based administration (although, to be fair, that problem is by no means unique to SharePoint).

The Web interface itself is well organized and will allow some degree of tuning what searchers will see in their results. You can add best bets, synonyms and "authoritative pages," which allow the boosting of specific content sources.

Tuning the actual results ranking, however, is quite complicated and not helped by the fact that Microsoft has imposed a sometimes rather quaint set of factors, which is important, because while weightings can be changed, the factors themselves cannot. Those factors are clearly Web- and SharePoint-focused--e.g., you can decide whether you’ll want to rate results from Word documents over those found in Excel files.

For analytics, the interface offers nice graphical displays with bar and pie charts, although their usefulness (showing for instance, the number of queries per day) is limited. More sensible, if basic, statistics on search behavior are displayed as well. However, as with many other products, the option to immediately remedy a problem identified is sorely missing.

Vendor intangibles

MOSS has become a kind of small world unto itself. For the customer, that brings both good and bad. One good thing is that MSDN subscribers can download a trial copy of MOSS 2007 to install and configure for their own environment.

One challenge for prospective licensees, however, will be finding solid integrators. Microsoft has a broad channel, but the depth of expertise on MOSS will likely be shallow throughout 2007. Even if you have strong .NET talent in-house, you should consider aligning with a consultancy that has really gotten inside MOSS 2007 and can help you avoid specific pitfalls. Here, as elsewhere, you’ll want to find those (relatively few, we think) specialists who have gotten inside the search pieces to MOSS, which are quite different from the rest of the tool.

If finding deeply experienced integrators might be a challenge, finding good resources on the Web should be comparatively easy. There is a surfeit of bloggers and forums--inside Microsoft and out--willing to explore the innards of SharePoint with you in a way, for example, that you can’t find with FAST. You can also find a raft of books on MOSS 2007 at any major bookstore. Most MOSS specialists, however, tend to be more up-to-speed on the portal and collaboration aspects of the platform, and less conversant on its search capabilities.

Microsoft excels at building technology partnerships, and many other software vendors are joining the MOSS bandwagon. Even other search vendors--with encouragement from Microsoft--are building search connectors to the MOSS 2007 repository.

Conclusion

Search in MOSS is both captive and benefactor of the underlying platform. Redmond itself doesn’t always seem sure what it wants to do with SharePoint. Microsoft’s marketing machine touts its out-of-the-box ease of use, which certainly does apply for its default file-sharing capabilities. But to developers, Microsoft promotes MOSS as a kind of .NET application platform. So it goes with search: The initial configurations are easy, more advanced customization gets very complicated very quickly, and woe to those licensees who don’t have good software configuration management practices in place.

To be sure, search in SharePoint 2007 is much improved over previous editions. But, despite Microsoft’s ambitions to compete head-on with traditional enterprise search providers, SharePoint search remains tightly bound to the underlying platform and is not ideal for searching across the enterprise.

In exchange for tight integration with the rest of SharePoint, you are adopting comparatively new technology here. We expect improvements in subsequent versions, but there is no official roadmap right now, and with the recent FAST acquisition, the future is even more uncertain. Today, if you have already installed MOSS, you might want to look at more mature search alternatives. Other search vendors have developed SharePoint connectors and Web Parts as well, and may be just as easy to set up, but more powerful for your particular scenario.