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MOSS Search Finally Gets an Update

If you are one of those organizations who has been frustrated by the search functionality in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007, then good news may have just arrived. Microsoft has released an update that will improve the search in MOSS.

Can we get a resounding “it’s about time!”

The search features in MOSS have always been a bit disappointing and frustrating to many a development team. With the announcement of the free Microsoft Search Server Express 2008 and it’s parent Search Server 2008 back in November, we thought we would finally see some improvements to MOSS search itself. It didn’t happen…

Then in March, when the general availability of Search Server Express and Search Server 2008 were announced at the 2008 SharePoint Conference, we again held hope that an improved MOSS search wasn’t far behind.

Well it’s been a couple of months, but that news has finally arrived…in the form of an Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Server.

Included in one of the infrastructure updates are some of the new Enterprise Search features that were shipped in Search Server Express and the enterprise version Search Server 2008 that weren’t already in MOSS search including:

Federated Search

The federated search works identical to that in Search Server Express and Search Server, so if you’ve been using either of them, you’ll be very familiar with how to configure it.

Federated Search

A unified Administration Dashboard

They have left the links to the old Search Admin in MOSS, adding the link to the new dashboard. Some additional improvements include a greater granularity for crawl source history and list that shows all running crawls and durations.

New Search Admin Dashboard

Several Search core platform performance updates

A couple of the performance updates are related to querying and indexing capabilities and bug fixes. There are KB articles that give you all the information you need to have.

In addition to the new Search features for MOSS, some other improvements include updates to workflow, the Business Data Catalog and Inter-farm server authentication with Kerberos.

Along with the updates to MOSS, there are some content deployment and infrastructure updates to Windows SharePoint Services, MS Project and MS Servers in general.

You can find all the detailed information you need on the MSDN blog and associated MSDN Enterprise Search blog.