Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

13.9. Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express

Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express (MSS) (www.andrewconnell.com/go/249) provides the power and flexibility of SharePoint search without the overhead of the collaboration features of SharePoint. MSS shares the search technology built by Microsoft for SharePoint but has added enhancements that will become available to SharePoint owners in 2008 as an upgrade.

The advantage of MSS is that if an enterprise search engine is needed but there is no need for the collaboration and Publishing capabilities of MOSS, a site can implement MSS Express free of charge. If more advanced features are needed, such as scalability to multiple servers, look to Microsoft Search Server 2008 (www.andrewconnell.com/go/250).

The major improvements provided by MSS include federated search and a simplified search configuration interface. The following table contains a list of the features as they compare to SharePoint:

	Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express	Microsoft Search Server 2008	Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Search Center	X	X	X
No Pre-Set Document Limits	X	X	X
Extensible Search Experience	X	X	X
Relevance Tuning	X	X	X
Continuous Propagation Indexing	X	X	X
Federated Search Connectors	X	X	X
Indexing Connectors	X	X	X
Security-Trimmed Results	X	X	X
Unified Administration Dashboard	X	X	X
Query and Results Reporting	X	X	X
Streamlined Installation	X	X
High Availability and Load Balancing		X	X
People and Expertise Searching			X
Business Data Catalog			X
SharePoint Productivity Infrastructure			X