Your employees are your most important and strategic asset. Providing them with the right information at the right time is more critical than ever, but the challenges have never been greater. Users’ expectations and demands are increasing, and content continues its explosive growth while becoming ever more complex. In the face of these challenges, how do you capitalize effectively on the rich information assets that exist – but are often hidden – within your organization?
Enterprise Search from Microsoft balances the demands of people and IT manageability. People are empowered to find information and expertise when they need it – anywhere in the organization. IT professionals can use enterprise search to manage, secure, scale, and extend search as an integrated part of a broader information management infrastructure.
Improve business decisions by helping to make people smarter – connecting them with latent information they need to make informed decisions. Increase productivity by making better use of what an organization already knows.
Explore and assimilate vast amounts of information using dynamic experiences that understand context – who the user is, what information is available, and what business processes are involved. Connect with people and expertise to create relationships that can help drive business results.
Choose best-in-class technologies based on your needs around:
ScalePerformanceReportingArchitectureContent SourcesData ConnectionsRelevanceUser Experiences
Scale
Performance
Reporting
Architecture
Content Sources
Data Connections
Relevance
User Experiences
Enterprise search tightly integrated with a business productivity infrastructure
Connect people, processes, and information using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This integrated information management system provides enterprise-class capabilities to meet business-critical needs including managing content and business processes, enabling better-informed decisions, finding information and organizational expertise, and simplifying how people work together across boundaries. Turn information into business outcomes with a cost-effective enterprise search solution from Microsoft.
Build search as a foundational platform for social computing, collaboration, enterprise content management, and business intelligence.
Bet on a search platform that will grow as your needs change.
Deliver enterprise-class search solutions with tools that give you the right balance of control and simplicity.
Find expertise and enable connections between people using dynamically updated personal profiles and social networking information that are integrated with LDAP, Active Directory, or any structured repository of people information. Sort your results by relevance or social distance, or pick results from a faceted list of titles and roles.
Allow people to manage their personal profile, identify colleagues, and share information using personal portals that augment your people-search results.
Make it easy for people to connect to, find, and act on information locked away in structured line-of-business systems (such as SAP or Siebel) by using a declarative framework to integrate them securely into search results. Configure actionable dashboards and mash-up interfaces for this data without writing any code.
Ensure that people find only the information they should have access to by trimming search results automatically, based on the identity of the user at query time. Access control lists (ACLs) for content on file shares, SharePoint sites, and Lotus Notes databases are captured automatically at index time.
Federate searches to indexes in other data repositories, applications, and services using the OpenSearch standard. Quickly import or export your federated locations using packaged Federated Location Definition (.FLD) files. Find federated search connectors in the Search Connector Gallery.
Scale your search infrastructure to meet your evolving needs, however big or small they are, using the same search platform across a breadth of server hardware and SQL Server database configurations.
Review common administrative tasks, monitor system and crawl status, and configure your search settings in a single, configurable view.
Best-in-class enterprise search for the most demanding applications
FAST ESP is a best-in-class enterprise search solution for the most demanding enterprise search needs. FAST ESP can be extended through FAST ESP Add-Ons to provide additional business value and enhanced user experiences. Together, these solutions offer an extensible and scalable search platform that helps deliver intuitive user experiences and positive business results.
Shape Intuitive User Experiences Guide people to the most relevant information using conversational search experiences that give them better answers. Tailor those experiences to meet the personalized needs of your people and your business.
Manage at Extreme Scale Tackle challenging requirements using an extensible and customizable search platform. Scale to meet any demand, while giving your business the control it needs to deliver relevant information through search-driven applications.
Deliver All the Content Users Want Unify structured and unstructured content. Extend content access to sources outside your organization. Enhance the meaning and structure of information to increase its value to your customers, employees, and partners.
Scalable platform Scale seamlessly with sub-second response time—even across extreme query loads and content volumes. Linear scalability for exceptional high-end price/performance.
Robust content retrieval Aggregate and transform structured and unstructured information across hundreds of document types. Configurable, flexible Web crawler and numerous content connectors. FAST Unity’s federation framework extends FAST ESP to blend and manage content from multiple search indexes and includes support for over 85 languages.
Configurable content pipelines Increase content value with prepackaged and custom modules that enhance and organize content at time of indexing. Advanced linguistics capabilities include entity and content extraction.
Business-tunable user experience control Tune the user experience to your specific business with configurable relevancy models, query processing, and results processing. Manage the user experience through a search business console. Facilitate user conversation with navigators, taxonomies, and clustering. Promote popular and premium content and products.
Programmable personalization Blend search and recommendations from FAST Recommendations. Deliver targeted promotions and personalized merchandizing through FAST ImPulse. Customize and apply user rank profiles dynamically as users navigate through your site.
Focused services and expertise: The partner ecosystem Get access to deep technical expertise and industry knowledge through our partner network. Powerful services and partner capabilities deliver best practice deployments and targeted vertical industry solutions
Search Doesn't Have to be Complicated
Deliver search to your organization quickly and easily.
Go from downloading to searching in minutes with a quick setup process.
Deploy a solution that’s easy to configure and easy to maintain, with less time wasted.
Set up an infrastructure that’s powerful enough to meet your search needs both now and as they grow.
Go from downloading to searching in minutes with a streamlined installation experience, which makes it easy to quickly get an enterprise search infrastructure running in your environment.
Review common administrative tasks, statuses, and settings in a single view using a unified administrative dashboard.
Manage content sources, search scopes, authoritative sources, key words, best bets, and other relevance-tuning settings through a powerful, easy-to-use management console.
Help ensure that only the right people can find information, using query and index-time security trimming.
Monitor search performance and improve search relevance, with query and results reporting.
Empower your users to find the information they need quickly, using a familiar Search Center interface.
Pinpoint the most relevant information you need, with recommended best bets, authoritative sources, term definitions, hit highlighting, and query correction.
Retrieve concise and clear search results using duplicate collapsing, which allows you to quickly review a wide variety of pertinent information.
Stay on top of new information relevant to your work by subscribing to update notifications of your search results using e-mail and RSS alerts.
Build upon a familiar user interface and application platform that enables you customize both your search experience and the actions you can take on your search results.
Employ a search capability optimized for business data that can deliver highly relevant results across intranet and public-facing Web site content. Scale your deployment to meet your needs with no preset document limits.
Find information across a variety of business applications and services using federated search connectors.
Upgrade to a multi-server topology with Microsoft Search Server 2008.
Upgrade to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 when you need to easily index structured information and expertise information, or when you need to add enterprise content management, collaboration, or other complementary capabilities to your business productivity infrastructure.
Take advantage of a strong partner ecosystem to implement and further extend your search solution
Search Center. Empower your people to find the information they need quickly, through a familiar Web-style search interface and easy-to-use query syntax. Reconfigure the layout of Search Center elements without writing any code.
Content summaries. Quickly browse textual summaries of content that appear in the context of your search terms.
Hit highlighting. Readily spot where your search terms appear in search results and content summaries.
Best bets and definitions. View highlighted, editorialized sites or definitions for common search terms likely to have a single authoritative answer.
Query correction. Receive helpful "Did you mean?" suggestions for misspelled queries.
Duplicate collapsing. Find the content you're looking for faster, using more concise, structured search results with grouped duplicates.
Filter by property. Filter content by configurable properties, including common properties, like document type, author, title, size, location, and date of creation or last modification.
Filter by language. Retrieve search results that are biased automatically by your language, or preselect a language to filter your results against.
Sort by date. Retrieve the most current information related to your search query.
E-mail/RSS alerts. Stay on top of new information relevant to your work by subscribing to update notifications of your most common searches.
Out-of-the-box relevancy. Get relevant search results immediately, without extensive configuration, using a ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Windows Live Search.
Localized interface. Use a search experience available in the following 25 languages: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.
Extensible search experience. Use powerful development tools (including Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007) to build customized query/results experiences and search-enabled applications on the SharePoint platform. For example, alter the appearance of your search site using XLST, or enable contextual actions people can take on search results.
No preset document limits. Scale your search infrastructure to meet your evolving needs—however big or small—using the same search platform across a breadth of server hardware and SQL Server database configurations.
Continuous propagation indexing. Improve the freshness of search results with an index that updates itself incrementally as it crawls information. Newly crawled content is propagated to the query servers immediately, so people can search it without having to wait for all content to be crawled.
Out-of-the-box indexing connectors. Index content on file servers, Web sites, Windows SharePoint Services, Office SharePoint Server, Exchange Server public folders, and Lotus Notes repositories.
Indexing connector API. Extend searches by indexing information in third-party data repositories, applications, and services.
Proxy server configuration. Configure proxy server settings to be used when crawling information on external sites.
Federated search connectors. Federate searches to indexes in other data repositories, applications, and services, using the OpenSearch standard. Quickly import or export your federated locations using packaged Federated Location Definition (.FLD) files.
Trigger words. Configure key phrases to trigger a targeted search of information within a federated index.
Federated results customization. Optionally customize the appearance of your federated search results using XSL style sheets.
Internet search integration. Use the same search query experience to retrieve Internet search results from providers supporting the OpenSearch standard through federated search connectors.
Search iFilters. Index a wide variety of documents and file types using an interface common across Windows Desktop Search, Windows Vista, Office SharePoint Server 2007, and SQL Server.
Search Connector Gallery. Reference the Microsoft online gallery of third-party federated search connectors, indexing connectors, and iFilters.
Relevance tuning. Retrieve the most relevant results from a single search query across a diverse set of third-party line-of-business systems and content repositories. Use a ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Windows Live Search.
Metadata property mappings. Identify custom metadata properties you want indexed, and incorporate them into search results, advanced search options, and search scopes.
Search scopes. Define custom sets of search results based on flexible rules. For example, define a scope that matches information having certain properties (like "people") or from certain content sources (like a specific Web site).
Authoritative sources. Identify and rank information sources that are most likely to provide relevant results. Demote non-authoritative sources.
Definitions. Define editorial text that should appear whenever a keyword or phrase is used in a search query.
Best bets. Recommend sites that should be returned as top results when a search query matches a key word or phrase.
Key words. Define words and phrases that trigger the return of definitions and best bets. Define and audit key word owners, review dates, and expirations for terms that are time sensitive.
Synonyms. List related terms that should return identical predefined results as your key words.
Common desktop search infrastructure. Use a search infrastructure that scales effectively from the desktop, allowing components such as iFilters and indexing connectors that are used for desktop search to be used on the server, as well.
Streamlined installation. Quickly get an enterprise search infrastructure running in your environment using the simplified installation experience.
Unified administration dashboard. Review common administrative tasks, monitor system and crawl status, and configure your search settings in a single, configurable view.
More information
Crawl scheduling. Configure data repositories, applications, and services you want indexed, and specify crawl schedules for when full or incremental crawls should be performed.
Crawler impact rules. Limit the performance impact of the search indexer on specific content sources by setting caps on the frequency of, or interval between, requests.
Server name mappings. Transpose intranet and extranet site addresses.
Index monitoring. Monitor crawl timings, durations, errors, and average performance over one-week and one-month periods for each content source.
Crawl logs. Review detailed status reports on content crawled by the search index—filterable by location, date and time, content source, and status.
System event logging. Track system events, and roll them up into Microsoft Operations Manager reports.
Query and results reporting. Review your most common searches, queries with no results, top destination pages, query volume, click-through rates, and most-clicked best bets. Identify not only the most popular searches, but also the least successful, and improve them by adding new best bets and content sources.
Enterprise-ready backup and restore. Schedule or perform impromptu backups and restores of your configuration data and search index, on premise or remotely.
Security-trimmed results. Help ensure that people find only the information they should have access to, by trimming search results automatically, based on the identity of the user at query time. Access control lists (ACLs) for content on file shares, SharePoint sites, and Lotus Notes databases are captured automatically at index time.
Secure federated relationships. For your federated search relationships, set global or user-level security settings that support basic, NTLM, Kerberos, forms-based, and cookie-based authentication mechanisms.
Crawl rules. Specify unique crawl inclusion and exclusion behaviors and authentication credentials for specific content sources.
Single-item index removal. Quickly remove sensitive content from the search index without having to re-index a content source. Crawl exclusion rules are created automatically to ensure this content isn't re-indexed.
Breadth of enterprise search solutions. Minimize your investment risk by betting on a common search infrastructure offering solutions that will grow with you, ranging from a quick, easy, and no-cost search server to a sophisticated business productivity infrastructure.
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