Microsoft recently introduced a new global initiative, Business-Critical SharePoint Program (BCSP), focused on helping companies use SharePoint to capture maximum value from their Line-of-Business data. The goal of BCSP is to evangelize and differentiate solutions that help organizations integrate their line-of-business (LOB) systems into SharePoint, in order to facilitate more effective collaboration and greater end-user productivity.  I am proud to announce that BA Insight was accepted into the program based upon our track record of helping customers maximize the value of their SharePoint deployments – our products enable the secure and unified access to data from across the enterprise, and empower knowledge workers to use SharePoint’s best-in-class collaboration tools to engage this content to achieve business goals.

Enterprise search technology is incredibly useful and powerful, but very few people understand how to apply it well. Perhaps because search looks so simple on the outside, or perhaps because of the universal familiarity with web search, enterprise search is generally poorly understood. There are many misconceptions and misunderstandings about enterprise search, and in many organizations the first comment you hear about an intranet is, “the search is useless.”

We can do search better. There is no silver bullet or secret sauce, but if you follow some basic ground rules and utilize some proven, practical techniques, you can make search something that people not only use but love.

“With great enterprise search, organizations can quickly respond to market changes, innovate and accelerate their time to market. Without good search, people drown in their own information,” writes Jeff Fried, CTO of BA Insight in his new article “The Search Journey”, “When search works well, people use it. Improving search quality will increase its utilization and make people more effective at their jobs.”

Have you ever wondered how Google returns a search result in less than a second? It’s all made possible through the magic of indexing. On periodic basis, Google will go out across the Internet and crawl all of the content that it can access. During this process, the crawler pulls each and every document, webpage, or whatever, back to the indexer, were the document is broken down into the list of words it contains. Google creates a database which in the world of search is often called the index. When a user executes a query, the index is what is queried for relevant data resulting is sub-second response time. Think of an index as a data warehouse for unstructured information.

Now all of this sounds great, but there are times, when indexing information is not appropriate or even possible.

I’ve been working on a custom search project recently and ran into an issue that had me scratching my head.  My FAST Content SSA wasn’t able to crawl successfully crawl content.  When I kicked off a full crawl it wouldn’t fail, but it would continue to run until I manually stopped it, never returning a single error, warning, or anything.  When I looked at the Event Viewer on the SharePoint Server I saw this: