With Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express
Microsoft announced an exciting new product this morning, Microsoft Search Server 2008 and its FREE counterpart, Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/default.aspx
While this new product (the two versions differ only in scalability) brings several new functionalities to the table, I want to just address one HUGE addition for those who are currently running just Windows SharePoint Service 3.0: the ability to extend your search across multiple Site Collections, file shares, other Web sites and other databases as well as federate queries to other search engines for content you do not wish to crawl.
With Windows SharePoint Service 3.0 search, your search scope is limited to the current site and its sub-sites even though all of your Site Collection information may be contained within the same index.
Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express (MSSX) can be added to your existing Windows SharePoint Service 3.0 farm or can be used to create your Windows SharePoint Service 3.0 farm and extend your search capability to include searches across all or selected Site Collections. This new product brings to Windows SharePoint Service 3.0, the full functionality of SharePoint Server 2007 search and much more.
You can now crawl SharePoint content, other Web sites, file systems, public folders, and other databases just like SharePoint Server 2007. You can create scopes, manage relevance, create keywords and assign Best Bets. And offer all of these search features to your Windows SharePoint Service 3.0 users for FREE!
And even more exciting, you can “Federate” your user’s queries to other search engines and receive results from content that you did not even crawl. That will be a subject for another posting.
Are there limitations to this free product? You Bet!
While the MSSX (think free) product will use SQL 2005 for database storage and will permit multiple WFEs in the farm, it will only permit one application or search server. For single server implementations, MSSX will use the embedded SQL databases. The Microsoft Search Server 2008 (MSS) license version (not yet available) performs more like SharePoint Server 2007 in that the search and query roles can be split providing more scalability. A patch will be available later which will upgrade the search functionality of existing SharePoint Server 2007 implementations with federated query functionality.
See Bill English’s blog at http://admincompanion.mindsharp.com/BillBlog/default.aspx for installation instructions and comments.