Interesting moves from MS in the area of Search. Before with SharePoint you had 2 options: MOSS Search and WSS Search. MOSS search was not free and included cool stuff like People search and searching in other databases via the Business Data Catalog. WSS search was free, but could only search one WSS site. Now there are two more options. Search Server Express and Search Server. Search Server Express is now release candidate, so you can have a look, it is a free way to search across all your WSS sites. The downside is no People search and BDC, and it is only for Single Server farms. Search Server will connect to MOSS, some time early in 2008, and will allow for federated search, in other words, you can search other indexes from MOSS.

Here's a comparison of the features:

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/default.aspx#compare

The bottom line is the more you pay the more you get, but Search Server Express is a great deal because it has great features and it is free.

Here's the announcement on the Enterprise Search Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/enterprisesearch/archive/2007/11/06/announcing-microsoft-search-server-2008-express.aspx

And some details form the MS site:
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/features.aspx http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb931107.aspx

Download Search Server Express 2008 (Release Candidate) here:
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/downloads/default.aspx

Labels: Search