Lars Fastrup on SharePoint Search

Mike Taghizadeh covering MOSS 2007 Search Capabilities

I just stumbled upon a great blog about MOSS 2007 Search by Mike Taghizadeh. I can recommend reading his two latest posts on stemming in the MOSS 2007 search engine.

MOSS Search Word Stemming - Part 1
MOSS Search Word Stemming - Part 2

SharePoint Explorer for WSS3

I learned that Patrick once again promoted our free SharePoint Explorer tool. This time on the Microsoft European SharePoint Conference 2007 in Berlin this week. Thanks Patrick

SharePoint Explorer has until now only been available for SharePoint 2003. But I once recompiled it for 2007 and sent Patrick a copy, which is the one he showed in Berlin. So now I better make it available to all of you.

You can download it here: SharePointExplorer_V1_5_1_For_WSS3.zip

**UPDATE March 9th 2007: Fixed bug where SharePoint Explorer failed to launch at all.

INSTALLATION
The zip archive contains a single EXE file that you must run directly on your WSS V3 server. The tool does not support remote connections to WSS servers,

IMPORTANT NOTES
The tool is just a recompile of our existing tool for SharePoint 2003. It does therefore not include any support for all the new cool features in the object model like features, content types, event handlers, workflow, recycle bin, etc. The tool is only good for exploring Virtual Servers, Site Collections, Sites, Lists and Files.

I am, however, working on a new and much better version that will recognize the new stuff in the object model. It will additionally also allow for remote access, which has been the #1 feature request since we released the first version for SharePoint 2003.

First Ontolica Screenshots

I have been asked a few times this week for some screen shots of the upcoming release of Ontolica Search for MOSS 2007. I have therefore decided to post a few screenshots now to give you an idea of how the new Ontolica is going to look like.

I have only picked four screen shots for now. The first three will give you and idea of the Ontolica search experience and the fourth one an idea about the configuration experience. The latter illustrates a configuration wizard for easy management of the property filters on the advanced search page. There are several other configuration wizards like one for configuring the actions menu on search results shown in the second screen shot.

The screen shots only represent one part of the complete Ontolica product - there are many more screen shots to come.

Ontolica Beta Program

We are now preparing a beta program for our new product Ontolica Search for MOSS 2007. We plan for a two month beta period with the following milestones:

Beta 1 on February 22nd
This release will only be available to selected beta testers. But we are still accepting requests for joining the beta program, You can sign up by sending an email to beta@ontolica.com. You wíll in turn receive an installation package plus some preliminary documentation on the 22nd. We will also arrange a live meeting online for all beta testers to give an overview of the features and how to use them.

Beta 2 on March 22nd
Second release with the improvements based on feedback from the field testing. We are still unsure whether this release will be available to the public.

Release Candidate on April 22nd and final release shortly thereafter.

Supported languages
Ontolica Search for MOSS 2007 will only be available in an English language edition during the beta period. We will send the product out for translation immediately after the final release becomes available. You can expect us to do translations for German, French and Spanish. We will consider other languages on request. You can, however, also translate the necessary UI strings yourself as they will all be available in standard RESX format.

Microsoft European SharePoint Conference 2007

I will attend the SharePoint 2007 conference in Berlin next week together will a few other Mondosofters. We will have a booth in the exhibition area where we will be able to give you a preview of the upcoming Ontolica Search for MOSS 2007.

I am also going there as a speaker. I will present the Microsoft session IT06 - Search Technical Drilldown on day 2 at 11:30. You should attend this session if you would like to get a better overview of all the great improvements to be found in MOSS 2007 search. The session will also include a few demos on customizing various aspects of the MOSS 2007 search.

Ontolica for MOSS 2007 explained

Let me tell you a bit about our upcoming search add-on for MOSS 2007. The add-on known as Ontolica for MOSS 2007 is a major upgrade of our existing product Ontolica for SharePoint 2003.

Ontolica for MOSS 2007 will like Ontolica for SharePoint 2003 simply add a new and improved search UI on top of the MS search engine that you get with SharePoint. This in turn means that Ontolica can easily be plugged into any running MOSS 2007 installation with lots of indexed content. Ontolica does not replace the search engine nor does it modify or improve it in any way whatsoever. Content indexing stays 100% the same after installing Ontolica. I like to emphasize this boundary as I by experience know it can be hard  for you to tell where SharePoint ends and Ontolica begins.

Ontolica will soon become available for beta testing for selected customers/partners and later to the public. I will tell you more about the Ontolica beta program and the dates in another posting tomorrow. First I would like to reserve this posting for publishing some facts about the new product.

Ontolica for MOSS 2007 will be available in the following two editions:

• Ontolica Wildcard.
• Ontolica Search.

The Ontolica Wildcard edition will come for free and will basically give you the same features as standard MOSS search plus wildcard search - hence the name. There will be a few more goodies in it that we don't bother to lock down. But there will be no email or phone support for this edition. We are instead working on setting up a community forum that the Ontolica team will monitor and provide assistance through.

The Ontolica Search edition is not free and will require you to purchase a license. But for that you get the complete feature set plus support and upgrade. It will, however, come with a free trial license for two users and no expiration date. This will allow you to do a technical evaluation without the need to request a trial license. A 30 day trial license with support for an unlimited number of users can be obtained when you need to include more people in the evaluation process on your test environment.

Here is a comprehensive list of features in the Ontolica Search edition:

• All the standard search features to be found in MOSS 2007.
• Improved Boolean search (AND, OR, NOT)
• Wildcard search.
• NEAR search.
• Consistent search across MOSS and WSS sites. The scopes "This site" and "This list" are now fully configurable and will take the user to the Ontolica search center instead of the WSS search page in the /_layouts folder.
• Site dependent search tab configurations. This is a quite pervasive new feature in Ontolica that deserves a posting of its own - I will blog about it soon.
• Complete web based configuration UI. No longer any need to mess around with overly complex XML configuration files like you had to in Ontolica for SharePoint 2003.  We took some beating for that one over the years ;-)
• Federated search. This feature will basically enable you search multiple SSP's from within the same Ontolica search center.
• Improved meta data search. Add your own meta data to the advanced search page with a few clicks. Select between a text box, a dropdown box or a lookup dialog for value input. 
• Display custom properties in search results with a few clicks.
• Improved Bets Bets. Ontolica will add support for images and audience targeting.
• Configurable action menu on results. Ontolica will include a fully configurable drop down menu on search results. The default actions that ship with Ontolica are:
  • View Propeties (teleports the user to the document library list item representing the document).
  • Edit in Microsoft Office Word / PowerPoint / Excel.
  • Alert Me
  • Add to My Links
  • View Details.
• Drill Down. Provides the user with a dynamic list of suggestions for refining his or her search. It basically works by analyzing the meta data on the search results. The list of meta data (properties) to provide suggestions for are also fully configurable. Ontolica will in the default configuration be able to provide suggestions for Sites, Authors, File types and Content types.
• Quick filters. Will allow you to easily configure some expression based filters that appear as radio buttons below the keyword input field.
• Document details page.
• Improved people search. Basically nicer thumbnails and more info displayed on each result.
• Image search. Ontolica will ship with a preconfigured search tab optimized for image search like you know it from g**gle / Live Search.
• Search result grouping. Group you results by Author, Site, Size, Date or some custom property.
• XSLT enabled web parts. All Ontolica search web parts are XSLT enabled to give you full control of the look & feel when required. Even the Ontolica search box in the upper right corner is XSLT enabled. You will, however, only need to worry about modifying the default Ontolica XSLT templates if you have needs that go far beyond common customization scenarios. You can really configure and customize Ontolica to a great extent before you need to worry about XSLT, which I know many of you do not really want to or have time to.
• Configurable web parts. All Ontolica web parts have a dedciated configuration page where you can easily configure the various options og the web part.
• Customizable search dialog. Create your own custom search forms.
• Plugs into the SharePoint feature framework. Ontolica search can be activated/deactivated on the site collection level.
• Site template for easy creation of new Ontolica search centers.
• Solution based installation process. Ontolica installation and deployment relies on the new solutions framework in Windows SharePoint Services V3.

Ontolica has in general been designed to be extremely configurable. We know by experience that you all have slightly different needs out there and we try to accomodate that by a highly configurable product. You can nearly configure all of the above features to a great extent via our new web based configuration framework. It will look very familiar to you as it has been designed in the same look & feel as all of the standard SharePoint configuration pages.

I will in later postings hand pick some of the features and go into a little more detail with them.

The product is as mentioned not available for download yet. But you can sign up for a free copy today on our product web site www.ontolica.com.