Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog : Documentation

Indexing Exchange Server 2007 Public Folders

enterprisesearch — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 03:56:42 GMT

I've had several questions recently about how to index Exchange Server 2007 Public Folders with SharePoint Server 2007.

Unfortunately with the RTM versions of both products it's not actually possible due a couple of issues with both Exchange Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007.

The good news however, is that everything is back in working order if you install Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 *and* your SharePoint Server also has Service Pack 1 installed.

The RTM versions of Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express are unaffected (As they already include the Service Pack 1 changes), so providing Exchange Server 2007 has Service Pack 1 installed they will both work.

None of this affects Exchange Server 2003 which works with the RTM versions SharePoint Server 2007, Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express and SharePoint Server 2007 with SP1.

Hopefully this stops people scratching their heads...

Richard Riley
Senior Technical Product Manager
Microsoft Corp.

Search training material available on TechNet!

enterprisesearch — Wed, 21 May 2008 03:09:30 GMT

We recently published ~17 hours of training videos for Enterprise Search on TechNet.

The 14 recorded presentations are based on training modules from a three-day, in-person training course ‘Implementing and Deploying an Enterprise Search solution’.

The presentations provide details about key Enterprise Search capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The content is recorded in English.

Michal Gideoni
Senior Product Manager
Microsoft Corp.

Add Virtual Earth Interactive Maps to your Search Server Site

enterprisesearch — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:40:24 GMT

Are you trying to think of ways to make your Search Server site more interactive and graphical? You can use Federation as a way to enhance the functionality of your search result pages.

The Federated Search Web Part makes it possible to display more than results from OpenSearch (1.0/1.1) sites on your search results page. The Search Server 2008 SDK explains how to include results from SQL Server database queries and search sites that do not expose XML feeds (such as Atom or RSS). In both scenarios, you do this by means of a "connector," a light-weight interface that sends queries to a given location or database, places the results into a structured XML document, and sends that XML to a Federated Search Web Part.

This sample demonstrates how you can extend the connector concept to Web service requests other than basic search queries. It shows how to use a connector to pass an address string to Microsoft's MapPoint Web service in order to obtain the latitude and longitude coordinates for that address. Once you have those coordinates, displaying a Microsoft Virtual Earth map requires only the addition of some Javascript to your Federated Location definition file. See this Codeplex project for the sample code (along with a sample Federated location definition file) and an explanation of how to implement it on your own site.

This sample is part of the Search Community Toolkit

Jim Crowley
Programming Writer
Microsoft Corp

Search Server Documentation on MSDN

enterprisesearch — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 20:36:19 GMT

If you're interested in learning more about the federation features in Search Server Express then head on over to MSDN and check out these articles;

Federated Search Overview

Architecture Guidance for Building Federated Search Connectors

Federated Search Connector Sample (for federating to SQL Server)

Creating a Custom Federated Search Web Part with a Credentials UI

Location Definition File Schema Reference

OpenSearchDescription

We also have several Discussion Forums for questions and advice (including one on federation);

Search Server Express Forums

Report a Bug

Known Bugs and Workarounds

Frequently Asked Questions

Feature Requests

Installation, Configuration and Administration

Developers and Customization

Federation

Richard Riley
Senior Technical Product Manager
Microsoft Corp.