Steve Arnold has a good post on the topic of SharePoint search. Over the years, Microsoft has been routinely criticized for its poor search, and much of the current commentary is directed at the confusion over Microsoft’s multiple search offerings. To be sure, that confusion will eventually fade as SharePoint’s penetration increases and the FAST technology that Microsoft purchased finds a home in the Microsoft search ecosystem. But that clarity isn’t arriving tomorrow, or any time in the near future.

More pressing for our customers is the complexity of setting up medium- to large-scale SharePoint search deployments. As Arnold points out, scale is a real concern with SharePoint’s built-in search system. ISYS opted to introduce its SharePoint Web Part a year ago as a result of customer demand for third-party search that would bring an added layer of sophistication. What users of ISYS SharePoint search get are added content analytics tools, such as entity detection, categorization, Boolean and proximity search, tag clouds and more, all out of the box.

These capabilities are key, but most important are the fundamental aspects of our tried-and-true indexing methodology, which Arnold cites as key to overcoming SharePoint Search’s scale issues. Read on.

If you’re planning on attending KMWorld in San Jose next week, be sure to stop by our booth (#219) and say hello. We’ll be exhibiting as part of the Enterprise Search Summit West, which is again co-located with the traditional KMWorld & Intranets show. The event takes place Sept. 23-25 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

It addition to showing off our new ISYS 9 technology, our very own Derek Murphy will also be participating in a panel discussion on multi-lingual search. Derek’s panel begin at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 24. Hope to see you there!