Sharepoint Foundation : Search Capabilities

SharePoint Foundation is its lack of a powerful search feature. Foundation can provide search results of the SharePoint content from within a given site
collection, but that is all. It cannot pull search results from multiple site collections, and cannot add external content sources such as file shares or Exchange public folders.


Search Server 2010 Express (SSX) is a free product from Microsoft that essentially takes SharePoint Foundation and adds to it the intranet searching capabilities. You gain the capability to add content sources such as file shares, other SharePoint sites, websites, and Exchange public folders. You also get the Search Center template and all of the associated Web Parts.

And if this interests, consider deploying SSX instead of Foundation, or if you have Foundation already deployed,you can simply upgrade Foundation to SSX. The only real shortcoming of SSX is that it cannot be configured to be high availability While Search Server 2010 can be configured to avoid any single point of failure, including the Search components, SSX does not offer that capability. It can only be deployed to one server in the farm; there is no infrastructure for deploying it on multiple servers to create redundancy. If you need a highavailability
solution, you need to move up to full Search Server. The only downside to the full version
is that it is a for-purchase product.