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

13.3. Search Administration and Configuration

Effective search administration is a team effort. In distributed SharePoint environments where Central Administration and the SSP are controlled by IT and the site collection is managed by a departmental team, search administration is shared by members of each team. Understanding the administrative boundaries of search administration can be a challenge. Additionally, it is important to work as a team to plan the communication of changes that need to be made by the site collection owner versus changes that need to be made centrally by the farm administrator. Working together, these groups can produce an effective search experience for end users.

There are three principal areas where search is configured. A site collection administrator can make decisions for the site. This person can add scopes, keywords, and best bets, but not affect the content sources. The farm administrator can change farm-level search settings, view the status of the Query and Index Servers, and manage the SSP. SSP administrators control all indexing and search capability for the farm, affecting every aspect of search for the sites in the SSP. This section addresses the different roles and the features available to administrators. Note that every level of access affects the search results. Even end users can affect the capability to find their content by the proper use of tagging with metadata. The following table describes the SSP sections:

Section	Purposes
Content ...