As announced on the SharePoint team blog, Microsoft released to the Web three new updates for SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Project Server 2007, Search Server 2008, Search Server 2008 Express, and Project Professional 2007 (whew!).
The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Server (KB951297) contains fixes and product performance updates driven by your feedback.
Updates have been made to:
· Workflow
· Business Data Catalog
· Inter-farm server authentication with Kerberos (described on the ITPro blog)
The new features, which include:
· Federated search
· A unified administration dashboard
… are what’s so exciting. I helped document these features when they shipped earlier this year in Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express.
When federated search is enabled, you can conduct searches against Web sites outside your organization. You or your administrator have to set up the Web sites that MOSS connects to, but after that’s done, the results display in a Web Part next to the results from your internal sites.
The screen capture below shows how federated search results show up on the results page – the results on the right hand side and top left are federated results, the ones at the bottom left are from the local index.
To learn how to set up federated search, use the Help topic (available only in the product) called Federating search results from other locations. Also, visit the Search Connectors Gallery to learn more and get preconfigured connectors. For those of you die-hard techies, learn how to build your own connectors on MSDN .
Some of the most commonly used admin functions are on a new Search Administration dashboard page. This should reduce the number of clicks you have make when configuring search; plus you can see useful status info all in one place – as shown in the screen shot below:
· Add your own shortcut by clicking Add new link on the right side of the page. Way to go product team!
· In I want to, you’ll find newly written Help topics.
· To quickly get to Central Admin, click the link under Administration (people sometimes miss that one).
For more information
· You can find Help on the new features, by clicking the Help links in the product.
· Read more about the new Search features here.
· For more information about how to deploy the updates and the Knowledge Base Articles see the Infrastructure announcement.
Let us know what you think!
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R.K. Smith
SharePoint IW Content Team