Microsoft Search Server 2008 offers a familiar search experience, empowering your people to connect with your organisation’s existing information and business systems. Search Server 2008 helps you build an enterprise-class search infrastructure that provides the right balance of control and simplicity.

Features

Find and act on your information

• Search Center. Empower your people to quickly find the information they need through a familiar, Web-style search interface and easy-to-use query syntax. Reconfigure the layout of Search Center elements without writing any code.

• Out-of-the-box Relevancy. Get relevant search results immediately, without extensive configuration, using a ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Windows Live search.

• Localized Interface. Use a search experience available in the following 25 languages: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

• Extensible Search Experience. Use powerful development tools (including Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer) to build customized query / results experiences and search-enabled applications on the SharePoint platform. For example, alter the appearance of your search site using XLST or enable contextual actions people can take on search results.

Grow and extend your search solution

• No Pre-set Document Limits. Scale your search infrastructure to meet your evolving needs, however big or small they are, using the same search platform across a breadth of server hardware and SQL Server database configurations.

• Continuous Propagation Indexing. Improve the freshness of search results with an index that incrementally updates itself as it crawls information. Newly crawled content is propagated to the query servers immediately, so people can search it without having to wait for all content to be crawled.

• Federated Search Connectors. Federate searches to indexes in other data repositories, applications, and services, using the Open Search standard. Quickly import or export your federated locations using packaged Federated Location Definition (.FLD) files. Find federated search connectors in the Search Gallery.

• Search iFilters. Index a wide variety of documents and file types, using an interface common across Windows Desktop Search, Windows Vista, SharePoint, and SQL Server.

• Search Connector Gallery. Reference Microsoft's online gallery of third-party federated search connectors, indexing connectors, and iFilters.

• Relevance Tuning. Retrieve the most relevant results from a single search query across a diverse set of third-party line-of-business systems and content repositories. Use a ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Windows Live Search.

• Common Desktop Search Infrastructure. Use a search infrastructure that effectively scales from the desktop, allowing components like iFilters and indexing connectors, used for desktop search, to also be used on the server.

Help secure and manage your search deployment

• Streamlined Installation. Quickly get an enterprise search infrastructure running in your environment, using the simplified installation experience.

• Unified Administration Dashboard. Review common administrative tasks, monitor system and crawl status, and configure your search settings in a single, configurable view.

• Query and Results Reporting. Review your most common searches, queries with no results, top destination pages, query volume, click-through rates, and most-clicked best bets. Identify not only the most popular searches, but also the least successful, and improve them by adding new best bets and content sources.

• High Availability and Load Balancing. Grow your search infrastructure to meet your needs, using a variety of front-end and back-end server topologies. Configure multiple query and clustered database servers to manage performance and ensure reliability.

• Enterprise-ready Backup and Restore. Schedule or perform ad-hoc backups / restores of your configuration data and search index, on premise or remotely.

• Security-trimmed Results. Ensure that people find only the information they should have access to, by automatically trimming search results, based on the identity of the user at query time. Access control lists (ACLs) for content on file shares, SharePoint sites, and Lotus Notes databases are automatically captured at index time.

• Secure Federated Relationships. For your federated search relationships, set global or user-level security settings that support basic, NTLM, Kerberos, forms-based, and cookie-based authentication mechanisms.

• Crawl Rules. Specify unique crawl inclusion / exclusion behaviors and authentication credentials for specific content sources.

• Single-item Index Removal. Quickly remove sensitive content from the search index without having to re-index a content source. Crawl exclusion rules are automatically created to ensure this content isn't re-indexed.

• Breadth of Enterprise Search Solutions. Minimize your investment risk by betting on a common search infrastructure that offers solutions that will grow with you, ranging from a quick, easy, and no-cost search server to a sophisticated business productivity infrastructure.

• Technical Resources. Make use of Microsoft's library of enterprise search technical resources and articles on TechNet and MSDN.

• Community Discussion Groups. Connect with your peers who are implementing Microsoft enterprise search solutions. Participate in community discussion groups here.

• Partner Ecosystem. Take advantage of Microsoft's broad partner ecosystem, with expertise in extending and implementing enterprise search solutions. Find an enterprise search partner.

Licensing

There are various ways to license Microsoft products - please see our ‘Microsoft Licensing’ buyers guide on the left or click Call Me above and we will contact you to discuss the options.

System Req.

• Processor: 2.5 gigahertz (GHz) (minimum)

• Memory: 2 gigabytes (GB) RAM (minimum)

• Operating System: Any of the following editions of the Windows Server 2003 or newer operating system with the most recent service packs: Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, Datacenter Edition, and Web Edition.

• Hard disk: NTFS-formatted partition with 3 GB of free space (minimum)

• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 with ASP.NET 2.0 enabled

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

• Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation Runtime Components