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Sharepoint Enterprise Search - what part of it is available in the standard installation?

Hi experts.

The version is sharepoint 2016. We are testing the product and took a seminar. The tutor told us, that enterprise search center is no feature of sharepoint standard, but only of the enterprise edition. After the seminar, we test-installed the standard and found that the enterprise search center is an installable feature and results look the same (to us newbies).

Question: may we use this feature using only standard CALs or not?

I hope to find someone that would not need to comb through MS technet for answering :-)

Walter Curtis

What you saw and used was the site template named enterprise search center. Yes, you may use it with a standard license. The enterprise features the tutor was referring to are backend features and a few web parts... (if 2016 is like 2013 that is. Haven't had a chance to dive too deep in to 2016 yet.)

Hope that helps...

McKnife

ASKER

Hi.

Good. And what difference in the results would we see (enterprise vs. standard)? Primarily, we use search to find content in documents and in our crawled intranet sites.

Walter Curtis

2013 combined Fast Search, a previously stand alone product, with standard search. I believe that now content in documents is searched. I do know for sure that your crawled intranet sites will be indexed with not problems, using standard search.

Maybe one of the other SharePoint guys will chime in here and answer for sure.

Tim Edwards

For the licensing difference it is:

SharePoint Standard CAL - people and expertise search, visual previews, visual best bets
SharePoint Enterprise CAL - standard search features plus entity extraction, video search, item recommendations

Basic Search center only allows to search within lists or within sites. Search results are displayed on a system page where you cannot customize easily. You can only edit the existing search page and search result page and we cannot add more pages of our own to it.

Enterprise Search center allows to search across site collections and even web applications. You can author our own pages, and overall much better control over searching in general. In enterprise search center, video search is supported and center provides Navigation Verticals. Also, you need to enable two site level features: “SharePoint Server Standard Site Collection features” feature and “SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” feature.

McKnife

ASKER

Tim, the first part of your answer is exactly what MS writes. I should have written that of course I looked at those specifications. What I wonder is: if we may install enterprise search center in the standard edition, can we/may we fully use it using standard CALs? Because it looks just the same as on our enterprise test system. At least that is what our developer, the guy who is testing search, reports and what I see on first sight. Same preview options, same advanced search settings are possible.

McKnife

ASKER

No comment on that?

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Walter Curtis

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McKnife

ASKER

I'll write our tutor. He was the one insisting on "search center is an enterprise exclusive feature .

Walter Curtis

About have way through this article, it basically say the enterprise search center template can be used on SP standard...

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh582314.aspx

Hope that helps...

McKnife

ASKER

I guess the naming confused us including the tutor. I will close this now since the tutor is on vacation for a few weeks.
Thank you.

Walter Curtis

Thanks, glad that helped...