New features and functionality for administrators
SharePoint Server 2010 includes new ways for administrators to help provide the most benefits for end users who are searching for information.
Improved administrative interface
SharePoint Server 2010 has the new Central Administration interface that was first available for organizations that deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007 and then installed the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers. This new interface centralizes the location for performing administrative tasks. With SharePoint Server 2010, administrators have an interface that provides the following advantages:
A single starting point for all farm-wide administration tasks, including search administration. The most common search tasks are highlighted.
A central location where farm administrators and search administrators can monitor server status and activity.
Farm Configuration Wizard
The Farm Configuration Wizard runs automatically after a Server Farm installation finishes. This wizard helps simplify deployment of small farms. It provides the option to automate much of the initial configuration process with default settings. For example, when you use the Farm Configuration Wizard to deploy the first server in a farm, the wizard automatically creates a fully functional search system on that server, which includes:
A search topology that can support an index of up to 100 million crawled documents.
A Search Center from which users can issue queries. This Search Center is created automatically if the person installing the product selects this option in the wizard.
The search system can crawl local SharePoint sites (sites in the server farm) immediately after the Farm Configuration Wizard finishes running.
Search service administration independent of other shared services
In Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, the Office SharePoint Server Search service was bundled with other shared services (such as Excel Calculation Services) in the Shared Services Provider (SSP). In that architecture, you could not create a new Search service without creating a new SSP. In contrast, in SharePoint Server 2010, you can create and manage Search service applications independently of one another and independently of other service applications.
Expanded support for automating administrative tasks
You can automate many search administration tasks by using Windows PowerShell 2.0 scripts. For example, you can use Windows PowerShell 2.0 scripts to manage content sources and search system topology.
Increased performance, capacity, and reliability
SharePoint Server provides many new ways to configure and optimize a search solution for better performance, capacity, and reliability.
Scalability for increased crawling capability
You can increase the number of crawl components to do the following:
Increase crawl frequency and volume, which helps the search system to provide more comprehensive and up-to-date results.
Increase performance by distributing the crawl load.
Provide redundancy if a particular server fails.
Index partitioning enables subsecond latency over an index that contains up to 100 million items, depending on the item sizes and types and other factors.
Scalability for increased throughput and reduced latency
You can increase the number of query components to do the following:
Increase query throughput — that is, increase the number of queries that the search system can handle at a time.
Reduce query latency — that is, reduce the amount of time it takes to retrieve search results.
Provide failover capability for query components.
Topology management during normal operations
You can tune the existing search topology during regular farm operations while search functionality remains available to users. For example, during usual operations, you can deploy additional index partitions and query components to accommodate changing conditions.
Operations management
SharePoint Server 2010 provides new capabilities for monitoring farm operations and customizing reports.
Health and performance monitoring
Health and performance monitoring features enable an administrator to monitor search operations in the farm. This can be especially helpful for monitoring crawl status and query performance.
SharePoint Server 2010 includes a health analysis tool that you can use to automatically check for potential configuration, performance, and usage problems. Search administrators can configure specific health reporting jobs to do the following:
Run on a predefined schedule.
Alert an administrator when problems are found.
Formulate reports that can be used for performance monitoring, capacity planning, and troubleshooting.
Report customization
You can customize reports that help you analyze search system operations and tune the search system to provide the best results for search queries. For example, reports can include information about what terms are used most frequently in queries or how many queries are issued during certain time periods. Information about peak query times can help you decide about server farm topology and about best times to crawl.
Searches of diverse content by crawling or federating
SharePoint Server 2010 can search content in repositories other than SharePoint sites by crawling or federating. For example, the search system can do the following:
Crawl content in repositories such as file shares, Exchange public folders, and Lotus Notes.
Use federation for access to search results that are gathered by other crawlers or search engines. An administrator might federate search results from www.bing.com or from a geographically distributed internal location, for example.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee667266%28office.14%29.aspx#BKMK_RESULT
