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If your about to go onto a new client’s site to install MOSS or WSS, these are some of the things that need to be considered:

• Base windows install – Hopefully this step will be done for you, as well as any clustering setup either via a load balancer or via NLB.
• Network Access to Servers – Will we have machines that are on the same network as the servers, I’ve been given machines in a test lab that was impossible to use without the VMWare infrastructure client, needless to say that environment didn’t last very long.
• Admin Rights – We need accounts with admin rights to actually install SharePoint
• Active Directory Setup – It’s always a good idea to understand how the organisation is using AD.
• Service Accounts – Make sure the IT department understand the importance of service accounts, hopefully have them pre-created before you get onsite.
• DNS – While you put the request in for the service accounts, double check that your DNS entries are all setup. Have a think about all the zones you intend to use (i.e. are you using web application policy to give admin users god like rights on the admin.portal site?)
• Database – Make sure your setup account has permissions to create databases, you’ll be surprised at how often the DBA’s forget this task.

Remember always to select the complete install, never the web front end only option, you always want the option to change the servers configuration (i.e. start the search server).

In both MOSS and Search Server it is possible to configure an xml file that controls expansion and replacement words, so in effect this is a thesaurus file that you can customise with words that may be specific to your organisation.

The classic example given is one which expands the technology acronyms (computer types sure do like them!):

   1: <XML ID="Microsoft Search Thesaurus">

   2:   <thesaurus xmlns="x-schema:tsSchema.xml">

   3:     <diacritics_sensitive>0</diacritics_sensitive>

   4:   <expansion>

   5:     <sub>Internet Explorer</sub>

   6:     <sub>IE</sub>

   7:     <sub>IE5</sub>

   8:   </expansion>

   9:   <replacement>

  10:     <pat>NT5</pat>

  11:     <pat>W2K</pat>

  12:     <sub>Windows 2000</sub>

  13:   </replacement>

  14: </thesaurus>

To find the location of this file you first need to look in the registry under: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager] Key: DefaultApplicationsPath

Once you have found the file you can simply add expansion and replacement elements with the children nodes as needed.

Don’t forget to do this to all the servers in your farm. Also you will need to restart the search service for these changes to take effect.

The following table (from the enterprise search blog) lists the elements and what they do:

I’ve only scratched the surface here, for a full overview of this topic, check out the enterprise search blog

Don’t forget that SQL Server full text search (FTS) has the same capabilities in terms of a thesaurus file that supports expansion and replacement words. If your looking for information on SQL Server 2005 or 2008 you should refer to this post.

The other feature that both products support is the notion of noise words, these are words that when used add no value to the search like ‘been’, ‘before’, ‘being’, ‘both’ etc. This KB describes the process to add or remove words from this list, but simply it is modifying the contents of a file which lives in: Data\Ftdata\SharePointPortalServer\Config, it’s a simple format where each word is on it’s own line (no xml).

Have fun customising the search experience.

From an MSDN article, I’ve found this concise procedure to setup an indexing server:

Enable or disable the index server role or query server role

1. In Central Administration, on the Operations tab, in the Topology and Services section, click Services on server.

2. On the Services on Server page:

   1. If the server name that appears is not the server that you want to configure, click the arrow next to the server name, click Change Server, and then click the server for which you want to enable or disable the index server role or query server role.

   2. In the Start services in the table below section, in the Status column for Office SharePoint Server Search, if the status is Stopped, in the Action column click Start.

   3. Click Office SharePoint Server Search.

3. On the Configure Office SharePoint Server Search Service Settings page, in the Query and Indexing section, enable server roles for the server as appropriate for your configuration:

   • To enable the index server role on the computer, select Use this server for indexing content.

   • To enable the query server role on the computer, select Use this server for serving search queries.

4. To save changes and return to the Services on Server page, click OK.

You may not have heard about Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express, just as SQL Server Express is the little brother of SQL Server, Search Server 2008 Express is the little brother of MOSS. It offers most of the enterprise search capabilities of MOSS minus the BDC.

I’ve put together a screen cast of the install and initial setup of the product, you’ll find that the entire process is almost the same as WSS or MOSS, that is because the product is built from the same components. The one notable difference is the new Server Wizard page, it combines all the common settings such as app pool accounts, selection of the index server, content access accounts into one place.

The search administration is the same as MOSS with the infrastructure updates, in fact the infrastructure updates goal was to align the work done around the Enterprise Search Server space with the search capabilities of MOSS, new features like federated search etc.

I highly recommend taking a look at Search Server 2008 Express if you want to provide search to your organisation without the committing to a full MOSS install or even to increase the search capabilities of your WSS farm.

The install steps are:

• Launch the installer, make sure you select the ‘Install all components’  from the advanced option if you wish to connect to a SQL Server, otherwise the stand alone option if you wish to use the SQL Express version.
• The configuration wizard will run after the install (just like SharePoint), depending on your option, I choose to create a new farm.
• Enter your database server name and the database access account, this account should have permissions to create databases.
• Specify a port for central admin to run on, try to make this consistent across all your farms, it makes it easy to remember that way.
• Once the setup completes, central admin will be launched, a page specific to Search Server will be presented. This page will ask for the content access account, the application pool account and various other options. I really like this consolidated page, hopefully we will see more of it in SharePoint 14
• In my case the web application was created successfully, however the site collection wasn’t created, so I selected the create site collection option in central admin and used the search centre template.

The higher quality screen cast can be found here or the youtube version:

Of course you should also subscribe to the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog to help stay up to date with this product.