Executive summary (Enterprise search at Microsoft, white paper)

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This is the second of 12 articles that compose How Microsoft IT deployed FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (white paper).

Applies to: Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft employees create and store large amounts of information on the Microsoft corporate intranet every day. Employees require a powerful enterprise search solution that enables them to find items on the intranet quickly and easily amid the huge amount of stored data.

The Microsoft information Technology (MSIT) group manages all aspects of the enterprise search implementation at Microsoft. In 2006, MSIT deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to provide a new enterprise search solution for employees. The solution was geographically distributed to provide fast crawl and query performance. It also provided an enterprise Search Center that all employees could access to perform queries on all intranet content.

By 2009, the content index for the enterprise Search Center approached the Office SharePoint Server 2007 maximum capacity of 50 million items, and the large crawl load caused crawl and query performance to decrease. At that point, MSIT evaluated options for migrating to an enterprise search solution that would provide benefits such as centralized management, greater scalability for large capacity, improved crawl and query performance, high availability, and advanced features such as fine adjustments for ranking of search results. MSIT chose Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint because it satisfied all these demands.

MSIT upgraded to FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint in late 2009, some months before the public release of the software. This white paper describes the experience of MSIT as an early adopter of FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. The articles describe how MSIT deployed and configured FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, how MSIT administers the search system, and how the solution meets the need for an advanced enterprise search solution at Microsoft by providing fresh, complete, and useful search results in a robust, highly customizable deployment.

In comparison to a SharePoint Server 2007 search solution, MSIT found that it takes additional hardware, skills, and people to plan, deploy, operate, and support a large deployment such as the MSIT search solution that uses FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. However, automation of certain maintenance tasks, together with careful planning and governance, helped MSIT simplify and speed up deployment and management of the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint solution.

Audience

The primary audience for this white paper includes enterprise-level business decision makers, technical decision makers, FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint server farm administrators, and search-service application administrators. SharePoint site collection administrators and site owners might also find this white paper useful.

It is assumed that readers of this white paper are familiar with the purpose and business value of enterprise search. It is also assumed that readers are knowledgeable about SharePoint search technologies, specifically about the search features and functionality of FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, SharePoint Server 2010, and SharePoint Server 2007. For information about search features and functionality in these products, see the following resources:

Non-goals of this white paper

This white paper is not a procedural guide. Because each IT environment is unique, each organization should implement enterprise search according to its particular needs. However, many of the considerations, practices, and lessons that this paper describes can be relevant to the implementation of enterprise search in other large-scale IT environments. For information about how to deploy an enterprise search solution, see the following articles:

Also, this white paper does not discuss the implementation of SharePoint services at Microsoft other than the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint search service and the SharePoint Server 2007 search service. For information about using other SharePoint services with the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint search service, see Lessons learned and MSIT best practices (Enterprise search at Microsoft, white paper).

Finally, this white paper does not compare the enterprise search capabilities of Microsoft products. For a technical diagram that compares enterprise search capabilities in current Microsoft releases, see Search Technologies for SharePoint 2010 Products, which is available in the following formats:

Note

For security reasons, names in this paper that refer to Microsoft-internal resources are for illustration only and do not represent actual names.

To view the white paper as a single article on TechNet, or to download it, see Improving enterprise search at Microsoft: How FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Powers Worldwide Intranet Search at Microsoft (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb735129.aspx).