Unlocking the power of search in SP2010Microsoft has spent considerable time and resources improving search between MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010. The back-end architecture has seen the bulk of improvements with the introduction of a newly redesigned index engine. But leveraging the power of SharePoint 2010 benefits greatly from implementing Ontolica.
SharePoint 2010 is now scalable to roughly 100 million items, taxonomy can be extended to seemingly infinite nodes, and nearly any content source can be crawled by creating protocol handlers in the BCS. The front-end search user interface has also seen several improvements. Answering the demands of frustrated MOSS users, Microsoft has finally provided advanced query syntax which supports partial word search (trailing wildcard) and Boolean operators. A limited search refinement panel has also been added so users can restrict search result properties. While these user interface enhancements are a necessary progression of MOSS 2007’s extremely lackluster search user experience, there is still much to be desired in terms of features and flexibility.
Considering the advances in enterprise search engines since the release of MOSS 2007, it is at first curious as to why Microsoft did not do more with SharePoint 2010’s search experience. It is not until Microsoft’s full enterprise search catalog is seen that questions as to why the SPS2010 search experience brings only a conservative set of new functionality are answered. The major improvements in features and functionality have been reserved for Microsoft’s new and expensive enterprise search product, FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. FAST provides SharePoint users with the features they expected to see included with SharePoint 2010 but for a substantial additional price tag.
When compared with FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, the Ontolica suite of solutions provides several improvements. Resolution of FAST’s shortcomings such as the ability to only execute full document previews on PowerPoint is why Ontolica Preview is available for FAST. When compared with SharePoint 2010 however, the benefits of Ontolica Search & Preview are extremely abundant.
Ontolica Search & Preview unlock the full potential of SharePoint 2010 by simplifying information access. Both utilize the existing SPS2010 infrastructure, security, and index engine so that the costs of maintaining a more complex environment and security profiles are avoided. The search features in Ontolica can be categorized into a few primary concepts.
- Faster access to information with fewer clicks
- Refinements to filter results to the most relevant items
- Document previews to drive decisions
- Actionable results to facilitate business processes
- Experience populated suggestions for to guide users to information
A full comparison of features between the latest version of Ontolica and SPS2010 can always be found on SurfRay’s website, but there a few enhancements which are of particular note. On the search center, users find new and significantly more configurable refinement options beyond those available with SharePoint 2010. Search results can be grouped by similar properties and quick filters offer users an alternative to building common property restrictions on the advanced search page. Even the search refiner web part has been upgraded to present the number of results in each refinement value, the site refiner category allows users to drill in and out of taxonomies using a breadcrumb navigator, and the refinements can analyze up to 2,000 items in a result set instead SharePoint’s limit of 500.
Ontolica’s ability to provide instant document previews for over 500 file types without any client side plugins in both search and document libraries is undoubtedly one of the most impressive features. Ontolica Preview can understand the user’s search query, cross-reference it with a target file, and highlight the occurrences of terms from a search query within the document. This quickly guides users to the information they are looking for within a document by noting the pages where query terms appear most frequently and displays high resolution previews with highlighted keywords.
Ontolica Search presents suggestions in three formats which include autosuggestions in the query field, related queries, and a tag cloud web part. Unlike SPS2010’s limited search suggestions which cannot be isolated to relevant user groups, Ontolica’s suggestion features can be isolated to a search center, the user’s department, or the entire company. As a result, users can receive search suggestions based off of the experiences from users in their own department, and do not have to receive suggestions based off of the entire company.
In addition to the broad range of additional search, navigation, and document preview features in SharePoint 2010, Ontolica empowers companies to overcome the difficulties of customizing SharePoint 2010. Ontolica’s features are significantly more customizable and can all be set to cater to specific user groups, even with only one search center. For example, users from the HR, Marketing, and Engineering departments require very different experiences from search. To give each of these departments a different search experience in SharePoint, separate search pages would need to be created and maintained for each department. With Ontolica however, users can all access the same search page but received customized refinements, search suggestions, and relevancy. Ontolica also provides administrators with simple tools to leverage metadata and expose it in the search UI without any custom development. For example, customizations such as adding new search refiners for custom properties or even a new search field on the advanced search page can be done by non-technical administrators within seconds. Anyone with practice customizing the search experience in SPS2010 can attest that while it can be customized in SharePoint 2010, doing so is a far more difficult request.
By leveraging Ontolica, organizations can realize the full potential of SharePoint 2010 deployments. Firms can quickly connect users with relevant information through navigation and refinement features, provide instant visual guidance on documents, drive business process through actions on search results, and guide users to new meaningful results. While these features can be added in a matter of minutes, Ontolica also gives companies the necessary tools to build new and exciting search experiences with cater to the diversified needs of users.
More information about Ontolica for SharePoint 2010 here
Get a trial license to test Ontolica for Sharepoint 2010 here