SharePoint Adds Improved Faceted Search And SQL 2008 Support

The past week or so has seen the release of a few enhancements and tools of interest to the SharePoint community -- improvements to faceted search, support for SQL 2008, and a third-party tool to help calculate SharePoint's total cost of ownership.Faceted search is a method of refining search results by various categories. An example of this would be the ability to pare down the results of a search using attributes such as author, repository, language, document type, and so on.

Faceted Search 2.5 as implemented within SharePoint adds a number of back-end improvements to make searching easier and more logical. On the user side, improvements in caching should make searches snappier while decreasing load. On the IT side, a number of enhancements to the APIs will help improve the consistency of results. For a full rundown of the enhancements, check out the post on the SharePoint team's official blog.

Following the recent release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 now both officially support the database and its tools. The benefits of using SharePoint with SQL Server basically map to the benefits of SQL Server itself: management tools have been improved, database availability has been enhanced with a number of improvements in data mirroring, and data security itself has been improved. For IT teams on the bleeding edge of Microsoft database technology, this is likely to be good news.

Calculating licensing costs for SharePoint can be very complicated, but a new tool from Bamboo Solutions -- one of most prominent third-party SharePoint plug-in development teams -- should make things a little easier.

The SharePoint Price Calculator allows you to enter a few attributes, such as number of employees and number of front-end and database servers, and come up with a quick and dirty estimate of your costs. It's far from exact science since many enterprises have different pricing and licensing arrangements, but it's a good starting point.

Good stuff all around for the SharePoint community.