Chapter 27 -- Migrating from Site Server 3 to SharePoint Portal Server 2001 for Enterprise Search at Microsoft

Chapter 27

Approximately 25,000 Microsoft users conduct nearly 125,000 searches each month (which translates to 750,000 queries against the search server) across the corporate intranet, called corpnet. Consequently, a small increase in performance can improve the search experience for users.

As Microsoft's Information Technology Group (ITG) approached beta testing of Microsoft® SharePoint^™ Portal Server 2001 in the summer of 2000, it used Microsoft Site Server 3 as its enterprise search solution. With Site Server 3, Microsoft employees worldwide could easily find and aggregate information from across the enterprise.

Migrating to SharePoint Portal Server yielded two key benefits:

More relevant and timely search results delivered to users.

• Latency, or response time, improved by 22 percent.
• Indexes updated nightly by using adaptive updates.

Improved crawling performance.

• Full update of an index nearly three times faster than Site Server 3.
• Adaptive update of an index seven times faster than Site Server 3.

Microsoft employees now enjoy more relevant and timely search results because of the improvements in performance, nightly updates to the content indexes, and the new probabilistic ranking algorithm used for relevancy ranking.

This chapter describes the ITG deployment plan of SharePoint Portal Server and the subsequent results. It provides detailed information and recommendations based on this deployment. It includes technical information on the existing environment, design decisions, deployment steps, and testing considerations. It concludes with a summary of recommendations based on this experience.

This is not intended to serve as a procedural guide. The intranet site names provided are for illustration only and do not necessarily reflect actual names.