MicrosoftВ® Office SharePointВ® Server 2007 Administrators Companion

This chapter focuses on how to implement Search technologies in the enterprise, including how and when to scale out to more index servers, query servers, or both. The chapter will also cover the broader aspects of Search management across the enterprise. We'll look at the Search topology concepts, as well as three different (and hopefully common) scenarios. You'll also learn about the administrative aspects of Search at the farm level. The content of this chapter assumes you've read through the previous chapter, Chapter 16, "Enterprise Search and Indexing Architecture and Administration," and that you understand the search concepts and terms presented there.

Enterprise Search Administration

From a planning and training perspective, it is important to note that there are actually three levels of search administration:

• Farm Level Farm administrators will manage these elements:

  q	Proxy settings
  q	Time-out settings
  q	SSL configurations
  q	Crawler impact tules
  q	Enabling or disabling services on one or more servers
  q	Creation of new Shared Services Providers (SSPs) and configuring SSP-wide settings

• SSP Level SSP administrators will configure a plethora of settings, including the following:

  q	Content sources
  q	Crawl rules
  q	Approved file types
  q	Global search scopes
  q	Click-distance settings
  q	URL removals
  q	Default content access account
  q	Monitor gatherer and error logs
  q	Install IFilters and protocol handlers
  q	Create custom thesaurus
  q	Monitor feedback and user activities
  q	Create keywords and Best Bets

• Site Collection Level Site collection administrations will be able to do the following:

  q	Display global search scopes in the site's interface
  q	Create new search scopes for the site
  q	Create, approve, and delete keywords and Best Bets
  q	Create and display search scope groups for the search, advanced search, and site directories drop-down lists

Search technologies in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 have a distributed administrative architecture, requiring enterprise architects, Office SharePoint Server 2007 administrators, and site collection administrators to coordinate their plans and work together to deliver a solid, robust search solution to the users in the organization.

You'll want to seriously consider additional training for your site collection administrators when it comes to managing the search scopes at the site collection level. In addition, you will get questions regarding who is supposed to manage the Shared Services Provider (SSP). It is recommended that an unusually technically oriented end-user manage an SSP, so best practice in most cases is that SSP administration should be executed by the SharePoint Server 2007 administrator.