MOSS Search - Customer Proof of Concept Scoping and Typical Tasks

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Hi all,

There are a lot of customers today that want to engage in a Proof of Concept or Pilot with MOSS 2007 Search. These customers would like to setup MOSS Search, configure it, index and crawl all their content and then present the results to their end users. The great thing about MOSS Search is that it is easy to setup MOSS and configure the Search to allow customers to see how this works in their environment with their content.

So I get pulled in a lot to scope out Pilots or Proof of Concepts for customers around MOSS 2007 Search. Below, I have included a sample on a typical MOSS 2007 Search POC. At the beginning, I have mentioned some of the areas that I like to investigate before starting to scope the POC. These questions can be asked from the customer before the POC starts. Once you have these answers, then those answers will then decide how long the POC might last, what work needs to be done, what the success factors are and what the tasks are in each week.

Hope that helps,
Mike
 

 Discussion points for the pre-POC call:

  • What is their current SharePoint or CMS infrastructure/deployment today? Do they want to search any of these systems?

  • What is their Authentication/Authorization requirements for this POC? 

  • Do they have any database content that they want to search in MOSS?  

  • What type of hardware, network, load balancing system do they have that can be used for the POC?

  • Can we install Office 2007 Client bits on some client hardware for the POC?

  • Where is your majority of content? Web sites? SharePoint sites? File system? Exchange folders? Lotus Notes? Other areas?

  • What are the type of content you have? Office Documents? PDFs? Images? Videos? Others?

  • Do they want to index and search any back end applications?

  • Where else can we point MOSS to, for indexing and searching of content? SAP? Siebel? PeopleSoft? ASP.Net applications? Other databases?

  • What is the success factor for this POC?

  • What are the requirements around people search?

  • Any already existing search products today?

  • Any requirements around presentation of results to end users?

  • Other questions that will determine the tasks for the POC

     

 Here is a sample MOSS Search POC task breakdown:

  • Installing MOSS and Office 2007

  • Setting up SSP, Web Applications, and Site Collections

  • Setting up Authentication and Authorization

  • Importing User Profiles into MOSS for index/searching

  • Building Site Collections and sites and assigning users to these

  • Indexing HTTP/SharePoint content in MOSS

  • Setting up the Search site to return results

  • Configuring Search web parts and other search related areas

  • Setting up and creating BDC definitions for external content to be searched such as SAP or Siebel

  • Configuring search to include BDC data

  • Customize the Advanced Web Part and/or add People Search to MOSS

  • Build MOSS master pages, content types and page layouts

  • Create styles, import images and build the look and feel of MOSS

  • Have BDC and People Search configured and working

  • Setup Keywords for the content

  • Setup up Best Bets

  • Modify the synonyms and thesaurus for Search

  • Write web parts for custom queries and custom searches

  • Write other web parts as needed

  • Work on relevancy of content

  • Setup searching of other data such as PDF

  • Customize search reports

  • Improve search performance

  • Build XML and XSLT for custom results

  • Other MOSS related areas

  • POC Closure and Recap