Users of SharePoint Portal Server will find that an out-of-the-box intranet installation includes a full text search engine. The focus of including this search engine was to allow groups of users, large or small, to be able to locate information no matter where it actually resides within the enterprise. This could mean all users within the enterprise could access a Human Resources site to search for the latest HR related documents, or you could have a specific business unit such as Marketing that needs specific information from the Marketing intranet. The robust search capabilities allow full text and Boolean searching in order to find the information that is desired. In addition, metadata attributes can be embedded in the document profile to ensure that specific information is located according to the way you want it located. NOTE Metadata is defined as the properties and associated values of a document. Examples of system-defined metadata include the size of the file or the last date a document was modified. Documents can also have user -defined metadata, such as name of author and title of document. Searching Based on Best Bets The new search capability now allows for the option to search based on relevance. The SharePoint Portal Server search engine ensures that the most relevant hits are retrieved. Additional customization and the use of best bets can be enabled to associate documents with specific categories. Best bets is a feature that allows individual documents to be associated with a category, series of categories, or series of keywords. This process ensures that specific documents are returned as the most relevant when a search is performed on the category or keyword criteria. See Figure 2.1 for an overview of a search with a best bet keyword defined. Figure 2.1. This example utilizes a best bet associating the keyword briefing with a particular document called Briefing Overview. When a user searches for "briefing", the Briefing Overview document will be displayed at the top of the list. This capability allows you to customize your portal, and tune the way you want documents to be retrieved according to the particular searches that are executed. As you can see, this will require careful planning when planning your corporate portal. |