In an effort to gain customers that are laboring over their network share drives attempting to find “their” file, Microsoft has release Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express (I’ll call it MSSe from here on out). MSSe offers, what Microsoft calls, “Familiar search experience.” I call it a blatant rip off of the SharePoint Search Screen, but it’s their product, they can do what they want with it. In fact, the whole thing has a Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) feel to it - wait, it is WSS…
As you’ve probably guessed, Microsoft is trying to make things easier for businesses to make the hop onto WSS systems. With this, there is a huge possibility on up-selling these customers to MOSS. Add this to the fact that Microsoft is carving WSS out of Windows 2003 to make it a standard download, you have the possibility of anyone using WSS and later upgrading to MOSS.
For a small business, MSSe offers a huge amount of features for a free price tag. Some choice features are:
- No Pre-set Document Limits. Scale your search infrastructure to meet your evolving needs - however big or small they are - using the same search platform across a breadth of server hardware and SQL Server database configurations.
- Continuous Propagation Indexing. Improve the freshness of your search results with an index that incrementally updates itself as it crawls your information. Newly crawled content is propagated to the query servers so people can search it sooner, without having to wait for all content to be crawled.
- Out-of-the-box Indexing Connectors. Index content on file servers, web sites, Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Exchange Server public folders, and Lotus Notes repositories. Find additional Indexing Connectors in the Search Connector Gallery.
Software Requirements for MSSe are currently (It’s still in Beta):
- Windows 2003 SPI+
- Windows Workflow Foundation Runtime Components and Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 OR Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0
- Application server role (IIS, ASP.NET)
- IIS, ASP.NET Web service extensions
Hardware requirements are not as bad, so I won’t even list them. Technically speaking, my laptop can run MSSe right now.
The big question will be: Will this be popular? I honestly think so. Having worked in several environments that utilize the Network Share Drive routine for file management, it’s a big deal to migrate your Share Drive content somewhere else - a very big deal (another story for another day). Easily installing a WSS plugin, so to speak, will allow anyone to make this jump within hours, not days or weeks.
