Microsoft throws out a few suggestions on various web pages that although Windows Search 4.0 is pretty cool, and may be suitable for a small and simple network, we should all really be thinking in terms of an “enterprise” search solution if we have more than a few servers floating around. This led me to wondering what, exactly, differentiates a “desktop” search tool and an “enterprise” search tool – especially considering that Windows Search 4.0 allows users to access remote indexes and leverage them.
Some time spent looking at Microsoft’s various search solutions, and playing around with them on my own test network, led to some tentative conclusions. An “enterprise” search solution uses a real, industrial-strength database (e.g. some variant of SQL Server) whereas a “desktop” solution does not. Enterprise search solutions give you an administration interface with things like logs and reports; desktop solutions give you little, if anything, along these lines. Enterprise solutions can connect with and leverage big, expensive search engines that your organization may already have, e.g. IBM FileNet, or EMC Documentum; desktop solutions don’t have this ability. Additionally, enterprise solutions give you more control over the indexing process, for example, via scheduling; desktop solutions give you comparatively little control over when and how the indexes get built. Finally, the biggest enterprise solutions give you high-availability capabilities such as clustering and load balancing; desktop solutions don’t.
You can test the waters with Microsoft’s freebie enterprise-class search engine, Search Server 2008 Express. It’s a single-server topology (no clustering) and uses the same platform as Search Server 2008 (“regular”) and Office SharePoint Server. It installs SharePoint Services 3.0 and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition if you don’t already have those pieces installed. I’ll be installing this product this week and discussing the experience with you here.
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