When I was in Perth last week at our Ready Summit (read: Launch event) I spent the day with my buddies at Tourism Western Australia (Sezai is one of the coders there – and one of the best MOSS 2007 heads in Perth… which is important because it is the most isolated city in the world).

Anyway we rebuild some test servers and they had to deploy their rocking search solution (which searches the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse using the Business Data Catalog and is a rebuild of their existing site).

The conversation went like this:

Sezai: Come back in 20 mins I'll have all the Managed Search Properties and the Crawl Properties created in the new environment.

Angus: Dude! C'mon – manual labour? No way – I'll write a tool to help you with this SSP Search Property deployment pain.

Back in Sydney I wrote some code (I like to call it Angus-pre-sales-dodgy-code)… it basically does the job but it isn't very elegant… but it does the job!

I then got Sahil Malik onboard to clean up my code (and rewrite it from the ground up), and to document the solution (because I like his writing style).

Sahil has done a great job with the tool and has blogged about it here – Sezai also blogged about it here.

If you ever need to take the output of one Shared Services Provider Search settings and import them into another one this is the tool for you – it will cut down on human error, make it easier to deploy and is like a mini-completely not feature rich version of WinApp Technology's Echo for SharePoint product (which rocks the hardest for SharePoint configuration, deployment & change management).

He will put it up on CodePlex shortly.