There’s an old adage in IT that ‘nothing ever goes away’. Retiring legacy systems is a painful, often expensive process, mostly because every system has some useful information in it, but it’s hard to distinguish jewels from junk within that information. There are times when migrating all your content and cutting over to a shiny new system is the right thing to do, and there are many strong content migration products on the market. Sometimes, however, a total migration is simply not necessary nor useful.

I’m a hopeless book hound, and in my life have spent more on books than on cars. I have thousands of books. The last time we moved, we had 60 boxes of books, and my wife made me a proposition: We would unpack the five boxes that contained the books we knew we wanted, and leave the rest in the basement for two years. Over the next two years, I opened a few more boxes and pulled out what I needed. At the end of the two years we donated the rest to the local library. Needless to say, our bookshelves were much more organized, and had a lot less junk.

Upgrading to Microsoft® SharePoint Server 2010 from Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 provides significant improvements in enterprise search capability. However, policy or resource constraints in an organization sometimes pose challenges that can prevent or postpone a complete upgrade. If your organization is not ready to perform a complete upgrade from SharePoint Server 2007, you can still take advantage of end-user enterprise search capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010 by deploying a solution that is known as search-first migration.

SharePoint 2010 has many new search features. Let me list the few that I think are the most compelling:

Enhanced People Search

One of the most compelling features found in SharePoint Search 2010 is around People Search. In MOSS 2007, users would often have difficulty finding people because they weren’t sure how to spell the person’s name and MOSS lacked wildcard capability. In Addition to that, Faceted Search was not available. Faceted Search is quite useful in that in gives end users the ability to refine a People Search result by department, skill set, job title, etc. These limitations are covered in detail in Martin’s Post. SharePoint 2010 Search now supports Wildcard and Faceted Search out of the box. SharePoint 2010 People Search also supports Phonetic Search which is a really impressive. This feature will search based on how a name sounds. So if I search on Brian, when in fact the users name is Bryan, it will find a match.