At the last AMITPRO meeting I was asked about having SharePoint search more than just the lists and libraries within the SharePoint site. Part of thinking is that if users became accustomed to browsing to the SharePoint site to complete this common task (search!) it may help with general adoption of SharePoint as another tool in the business.
My answer to the question was you could use something like Search Server Express. It’s a free product provided by Microsoft and can be used for searching SharePoint sites, file shares and even other websites (whether you’d want or should index something like Google for example is another discussion altogether!)
What I didn’t touch on was the practicalities of actually doing this in an SBS environment. In SBS 2008 you can’t safely install it directly onto the server so you’re only other option was to put it on it’s own server.
However…help is at hand!
Robert Crane, author of the Windows SharePoint Operations Guide has put together a complete guide to getting Search Server Express running on SharePoint 2011.
It does come with a massive “use at your own risk” disclaimer but the steps are straightforward and there also instructions to remove the product if needed.
Once finished you’ll end up with a dedicated search site that can search for information from a variety of sources (e.g http://companyweb/search)
Robert has posted the details for getting up and running on his blog. The full guide which goes into more details is available here for £6.24.
I’ve seen the guide and it’s well worth the money!
Go check it out
