Running two Search Service Applications isolates your collaboration and My Sites crawl pipelines at the cost of creating a search silo — users searching from the Enterprise Search Centre cannot see personal content. This post covers the dual-SSA federation pattern using Remote Result Sources: what it solves, where it falls short, and how to configure it step-by-step in Central Administration.
SPSE
Controlling SharePoint Crawl Performance: Impact Rules and Crawl Rules
An unconfigured SharePoint crawler runs at full throughput — opening as many simultaneous connections to your WFEs as they will accept and downloading every file regardless of size. This post covers the two PowerShell scripts that give you precise crawl throttling control: crawler impact rules per WFE host, a large-file metadata-only threshold, and URL-pattern exclusion rules that eliminate redundant crawl noise.
Scaling SharePoint Search for Large Enterprise Farms: Index Distribution and Crawl Isolation
As a SharePoint farm grows beyond 80 million indexed items, co-locating index, crawl, and content processing components on the same servers creates I/O contention and crawl queue bottlenecks. This post covers the large farm reference architecture — dedicated index servers, distributed index partitions, and isolated crawl databases — and how to implement it with PowerShell.
Deploying a Custom SharePoint Search Topology with PowerShell (End-to-End)
Deploying a SharePoint Search topology has a precise order of operations — and specific failure modes that will waste hours if you don't know them in advance. This guide covers the four-script pipeline from SSA creation to topology activation, with clean-slate recovery steps for the most common deployment failures.
Designing the Right SharePoint Search Topology for Production SPSE Farms
The default SharePoint search topology gets you up and running quickly. For production farms, deliberate design choices around component placement, high availability, and crawl isolation are what turn a functional search deployment into a resilient one. This post explains all six search components, when to use a single SSA vs. dual SSA, and how to design the right topology before running a single script.
Testing Port Connectivity and Firewall Rules for SharePoint Subscription Edition
SharePoint migrations fail at the firewall — not because admins skip the checklist, but because no one ran an actual test from the right source server to the right destination on the right port. This post provides a config-driven, role-aware PowerShell toolkit that tests every required port across your SPSE farm, remediates blocked paths automatically, and produces an HTML report your infrastructure and security teams can sign off before the cutover window opens.#sharepoint #microsoft #sp2019 #spse #migration
The Complete Guide to Migrating SharePoint 2019 to SharePoint Subscription Edition
SharePoint 2019 extended support ends July 14, 2026 — after that date, Microsoft issues no further security patches. This guide covers the complete five-phase migration path from SP2019 to SharePoint Subscription Edition: discovery, validation, preparation, cutover, and post-migration sign-off. Built from production migration experience, with PowerShell scripts mapped to every phase.