Mart Muller's Weblog

There is a new release of the MOSS Faceted Search solution available. A summary of the new features:

• Caching – dramatically improves performance and decreases the load on the search engine
• Synchronization with Core
• Search Results web part
• Support for advanced search
• Match of search counters
• Introducing Parent-Child relationships
• Extending search to logical “OR” queries
• Simplified web part properties

There are some interesting plans for future releases as well:

Last week we received an email telling us that we are the winner of the Search Partner of the Year Award! We are very proud receiving this Microsoft award for a project we did with Twijnstra en Gudde, a Dutch company.

Basically what we did for the user, is creating one single search text box:

Underneath however, it searches many different subsystems like CRM data, Projects, a document management system, people in the organization and all the relations they have with each other.

Using Ontolica search for MOSS 2007 and the Business Data Catalog (BDC), we achieved a user friendly user interface with all kind of drill down options that go through all the different systems.

Anyway, great achievement for Tam Tam and the people that worked on this project!

Find out firsthand how Microsoft enterprise search products make finding information within your organization easier than ever before. Download Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express for free today or try Search Server or Office SharePoint Server for 180 days.

Download here

Due to personal circumstances I have to skip the SharePoint Conference 2008 next week :(. Too bad because it seems that it will be a great event with many interesting people going there.

Anyway, two colleagues will be there to make sure Tam Tam doesn't miss anything interesting. They brought the MOSS 2007 personalized tagging and rating solution on VPC so I've you're there and interested please drop me a line and I'll forward it to them. I've had many questions about how it will be put on the market. The two guys who created it will licence it as a product and prices will be available soon, I will keep you posted on this blog. In my opinion it would have been great if they put it on codeplex or made it part of the Community Kit for SharePoint, but I am curious how this will go!

For the Dutch readers and conference visitors, Pascal Lagarde and Wouter Geurtzen (my colleagues) will present one of our enterprise search cases (Twynstra en Gudde) on Monday at the session MS Netherlands has planned. There will be time for you to give them your opinion about it. You can also drop me a line if you like of course.

For the other conference visitors, check out the Sharepint By Night evening at the Kells Irish Pub in Seattle on Wednesday. This will interesting and fun I guess! Many interesting people (MVP's, community people, etc) will have pint and chat about.. well SharePoint duh!

And, last but not least, Lawrence Liu will host the SharePoint User Groups Site meeting on Monday. This seems to be interesting for the DIWUG members.

Of course, I'm very curious about how it will be and I know there will be interesting sessions for everyone. So, have fun next week, and I will keep an eye on the SPC2008 blog postings!

Good news via William Bear:

"The Microsoft Filter Pack for search has been released enabling critical search scenarios across a variety of Microsoft Search products including SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Search Server 2008, Search Server 2008 Express Edition, Exchange Server 2005, SQL Server 2005/2008, and Windows Desktop Search 3.1/4.0.

The Microsoft Filter Pack provides iFilters for the following file type extensions:

• .docx (Microsoft Office 2007 Word Document)
• .docm (Microsoft Office Word Macro-Enabled Document)
• .pptx (Microsoft Office 2007 PowerPoint Presentation)
• .xlsx (Microsoft Office 2007 Excel Worksheet)
• .xlsm (Microsoft Office Excel Macro-Enabled Worksheet)
• .xlsb (Microsoft Office Excel Binary Worksheet)
• .zip (WinZip File)
• .one (Microsoft Office OneNote Section)
• .vdx (Microsoft Office Visio Drawing)
• .vsd (Microsoft Office Visio Drawing)
• .vss (Microsoft Office Visio Stencil)
• .vst (Microsoft Office Visio Template)
• .vsx (Microsoft Office Visio Stencil)
• .vtx (Microsoft Office Visio Template)

NOTE The current release is not localized and available at this time in English only supporting both x86 and x64 architectures.  To download the Microsoft Filter Pack or to learn more visit:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=60C92A37-719C-4077-B5C6-CAC34F4227CC&displaylang=en."