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Plan search (Office SharePoint Server)

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Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

This Office product will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see , Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

 

Topic Last Modified: 2015-06-08

The articles in this chapter include:

In this article:

  • Why two search services?

  • Plan the search team

  • Plan to crawl content

  • Plan the end-user search experience

Planning search is an important part of planning any deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. If you devote time to plan how search is implemented, you can save time in the future and can reinforce the effectiveness of other business processes.

Planning carefully for search can prepare you for an initial limited deployment. You can continue to refine your search implementation, such as adding additional crawled content to the content index. Using an effective planning process can help make your search solution more effective, even if you implement the solution in stages or your needs continue to evolve after initial deployment.

You should also plan the following practical aspects of using search features:

  • What roles will be performed by the people who will manage the search features.

  • Whether you want to customize search Web Parts or the Search Center site (Enterprise edition only).

  • Whether you want to use custom search applications.

  • Whether you need to include data from external sources.

Why two search services?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides two search services: Office SharePoint Server Search and Windows SharePoint Services Help Search. Each of these services can be used to crawl, index, and query content, and each service uses a separate index.

The Office SharePoint Server Search service is based on the search service that is provided with earlier versions of SharePoint Products & Technologies, but with many improvements. You should use the Office SharePoint Server Search service to crawl and index all content that you want to be searchable (other than the Help system).

Note

For the purposes of this planning guide, the Office SharePoint Server Search service is referred to as the Search service.

The Windows SharePoint Services Help Search service is the same service provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, although in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 it is called the Windows SharePoint Services Search service. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 uses this service to index site content, index Help content, and serve queries.

As its name implies, in Office SharePoint Server 2007 the purpose of the Windows SharePoint Services Help Search service is to enable searching of the Help system that is built into Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Because the Windows SharePoint Services Help Search service uses an index that is separate from the other search service, users' queries in the Search box for the Help system return hits for only Help content. If you do not want users to be able to search the Help system, you do not need to start this service.

Plan the search team

You need to identify the search team and assign administration roles to the people on the team. Depending on the size of your organization, some members of the search team might be assigned more than one role. For more information, see Identify your search team (Office SharePoint Server).

Plan to crawl content

Before users can search for content, you must make that content available to search queries by crawling the content to build the content index. You plan for crawling by determining where the content is that you want to crawl, what type of content it is, and security credentials for accessing the content, among other things. This section of the guide can help you make the decisions necessary to effectively plan for crawling. It provides a worksheet that you can use to record the choices you make during this part of the planning phase. You can then use your completed worksheet when you deploy search.

For more information, see Plan to crawl content (Office SharePoint Server).

Plan the end-user search experience

After you plan how to crawl content, you can then plan the end-user search experience. This includes determining what users see when performing queries and what they see in the search results pages. For more information, see Plan the end-user search experience (Office SharePoint Server).