SharePoint Search: where to go from here…

search_smallA lot of users are disappointed with the search function that is in MOSS 2007. Some of them are looking for other alternatives, or just leaving SharePoint because of this.

First, I still believe that you can get a decent user experience with the out of the box search engine. It is just not something you can turn on and forget about it. Best bets, customisation of the search results, authoritative pages, scopes… just don’t come there by themselves, you need to create, maintain and promote them.

But for those who are still looking for a more enhanced search, there is some light in the darkness: Microsoft announced yesterday that the FAST search engine WILL be included in the next version of SharePoint, and offers an solution for customers who need the enhanced search today.

Quotes from SharePoint Best Practices

It is an amazing experience to attend the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in San Diego. MVP speakers, a beautiful location, and very interesting content.

It’s impossible to summarize what I learned until now in a blog post, but these quotes will give you an idea of what’s happening:

  • SharePoint is not about building software, it’s about building services.
  • The most difficult thing about SharePoint is the people thing.
  • Information that is hard to find, is hardly ever used.
  • Vista is Microsoft’s gift to Apple.

To avoid that some people lose their MVP status, I will not tell anybody who made the last statement.  🙂

SharePoint and Office 14 for web

I watched this video this afternoon, and there was one specific sentence that drew my attention (around 3:20″): “Customers can run these (web versions of Office) on the SharePoint servers in their enterprise”. 

Very interesting! So in the future, we won’t even talk about a tight integration between Office and SharePoint, it might just be the same thing. Client applications that today run on top of SharePoint to keep users away from the browser and on their familiar desktop will be useless. Offline use of SharePoint will be a non-issue, you need to be connected all the time. 

Have a look at the video yourself (requires Silverlight).