Microsoft Site Server

Site Server is designed to help you get the most usability from your corporate intranet. Site Server enables users to publish, find, and share information quickly and easily. Features include extensive search capabilities and tools to perform thorough analyses of your intranet's usage and effectiveness.

Site Server Commerce Edition is a comprehensive, Internet commerce server that enables you to engage customers, transact business, and analyze commerce Web sites. Highly scalable and secure, Site Server Commerce Edition streamlines and integrates your online dealings with distributors and suppliers.

Since the introduction of Site Server 3 Standard Edition and Site Server 3 Commerce Edition in May 1998, the Web marketplace has evolved rapidly. Site Server 3 Standard Edition targets the intranet space, allowing users to find, share, and publish information to their corporate intranets. In comparison, Site Server 3 Commerce Edition targets the Internet space, with the ability to conduct a financial transaction online, analyze transactions, and conduct a personalized interaction with the consumer.

Since then, the needs of the intranet market have changed substantially and have evolved into the portal market, with greater need for core services and application integration as well as a continued requirement for robust enterprise-wide search. As a result, product focuses have shifted accordingly. The search technology of Site Server 3 Standard Edition is expanded in SharePoint Portal Server.

The following list describes the components of Site Server.

• Data access. Site Server introduced the concept of gathering and the concept of protocol handlers. Site Server can crawl Exchange Server 5.5 computers and Web sites. The Gatherer can process both hierarchical (file system) and Web spaces (HTTP). Site Server does not support custom protocol handlers. The interface is not extensible to support new document stores. Site Server can crawl information from databases by using an ASP page that renders the information from rows in a database.
• Filters. Site Server uses the same filters as Indexing Service. Site Server uses filters installed on the operating system, including the MIME filter for news and e-mail, the Office filter for Office documents, and the HTML filter.
• Ranking. Site Server uses the same ranking as Indexing Service. Site Server uses ranking algorithms based on the vector space model. The default algorithm used is the Jaccard formula. For more information about the specific algorithms, see Appendix B.
• Schema support. Site Server provides rich, broad schema support. Users can define properties over OLE DB data types by using a proprietary management interface.
• Extensibility and programmability. Site Server has its own object model.
• Query language. Site Server uses Query Dialect 1 and SQL full-text extensions.