Microsoft this week announced the release of a number of search-centric enhancements for SharePoint, as well as enhancements and bug fixes for content deployment. These fixes, along with some patches for MS Office Project 2007 and MS Office Project Server 2007, are being collectively packaged together as the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Infrastructure Update.

Improvements to search couldn't come at a better time. Shortcomings in enterprise search have been snagging a lot of headlines in enterprise content management circles lately, with research showing that users simply aren't able to find what they're looking for. These problem certainly aren't limited to enterprises running SharePoint, but hopefully these improvements will ease the issues for some users.

The updates to SharePoint search are taken, for the most part, from the search capabilities of Microsoft Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express. The main user-impacting feature is federated search, which brings together internal search results from the user's enterprise with results from the Web or other preconfigured sources.

SharePoint admins will be pleased to find improvements to the administration dashboard, which cleans up and simplifies common functions. For more details on the search related improvements, you can check out an overview of what's included in the Infrastructure Update on the MSDN Get The Point blog.

The content deployment piece of the Infrastructure Update doesn't add much in terms of new features, but does fix more than 20 bugs. For additional details on the Content Deployment and the Infrastructure Update, take a look at the MSDN Enterprise Content management blog.