Search Tools Product Report

SharePoint (Microsoft Tahoe)

Product Information

Technical Information (high-level documentation explaining how to send queries, etc.)

Platform: Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server
Price: reportedly $3995 per server plus $72 per user (volume discounts available)

• Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) with a search engine
• indexes file servers, Web sites, Lotus Notes servers, email archives from Microsoft Exchange Public Folders
• adaptive and incremental crawling to keep contents current
• integrated document management
• uses probabilistic ranking in results
• a "Best Bets" feature emphasizes the most-frequently-linked documents, recommendations for special search queries
• thesaurus for storing term synonyms
• "subscriptions" to search query notify users when there is new information
• automatically classifies content into pre-defined topical category hierarchies (see the SearchTools Report on Classification for background on this)
• default file format compatibility with HTML, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, IFilter interface lets programmers write modules to read additional data types
• Search engine and classification algorithms based on work from Microsoft Research
• Training: Microsoft SharePoint Training Page

Articles & Reviews

• Explore SharePoint Portal Server [paid access only]DevX, April 4, 2001 by Pete Nash
  Provides an overview of SharePoint, concentrating on the advantages of indexing data without copying locally, customization and administrator control. Short description of searching on page 3.
  
  
• Microsoft readies knowledge-management server for shipment Network World, March 28, 2001 by John Fontana
  Short description of SharePoint, with a mention of the Search engine developed by Microsoft Research -- it's said to be similar to that in SQL Server 7.0 with probabilistic search, and an adaptive crawling algorithm that tracks quickly-changing data.
  
  
• SharePoint Portal Server 2000 InternetWorld March 15, 2001 by Jacques Surveyer
  Describes the technologies and standards used in SharePoint within the context of the .Net initiative, and particularly its integration with Microsoft Exchange.
  
  
• Autonomy braced as Microsoft muscles in on fight for market Business Weekly UK: March 7, 2001
  Describes effect of Microsoft SharePoint on Autonomy's corporate market and general business issues. Includes a customer describing problems with product user-friendliness.
  
  
• Microsoft's Tahoe is "too lightweight" Computing, January 11, 2001 by Andy McCue
  Quotes industry analysts as criticizing Tahoe (SharePoint) as too lightweight for large-scale enterprise users, designed to work with a single Exchange server. They point to the "Yukon" SQL Server, currently under development, as a more scalable long-term solution and recommend that users should not spend too many resources on Tahoe development.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Readies Portal Server Network World, January 9, 2001 by John Fontana
  Describes announcement and criticism from analysts who claim the product overlaps Microsoft offerings. Compares it to Lotus Raven.
  
  
  
• First Look: Microsoft Tahoe: Document Management and Much More Microsoft Office & Visual Basic for Applications Developer, December, 2000 by Tom Rizzo
  Microsoft product manager provides some details on the search and indexing, including information on query caching and subscriptions and adding relevance weight within query commands.

Examples

• AIT Demo (SharePoint systems integrator)