Lars Fastrup on SharePoint Search

Ontolica for MOSS 2007 RTM

I am together with the rest of Mondosoft proud to announce the RTM release of Ontolica for MOSS 2007. This is a great milestone for us that deserves to be celebrated and our internal release party will therefore bring us to the Noerrebro Brew House tonight for a great Beer experience....

In brief the product simply offers an improved search UI on top of the MOSS 2007 search engine. It is also a major upgrade of our first SharePoint search add-on Ontolica for SharePoint Portal Server 2003. We released the first beta of Ontolica for MOSS 2007 back in February this year and more than 100 companies signed up as a beta tester. Thank you all for your participation, I would like to thank all of you for the great feedback you have provided to us during the beta testing period. 

Licensing
Ontolica ships with two built-in licenses to get you started using the product right away. The first license is the Free Evaluation license and the second one is the Free Wildcard license. The evaluation license gives you full functionality for an unlimited time period but for one server and two unique users only. The Wildcard license is a free production license that will give you limited functionality for an unlimited number of servers and users and with no expiration date. You may also request a 30 day trial license if you need to evaluate the product with full functionality and unlimited servers and users.

The free Wildcard license will basically give you all standard SharePoint search features + wildcard search. A production license for Ontolica with full functionality requires you to purchase a license from our sales team.

Features
Here is the full list of features included in the RTM release. We did a while back decide to take out a few of the features I mentioned here in February. They were postponed in favour of new features like implicit wildcard search and sorting results by custom properties plus some internal features. But not to worry - we will continue improving the product and add the promised features along with other great features requested by our customers and partners. I hope to be able to post a feature road map soon.

• All the standard search features to be found in MOSS 2007.
• Improved Boolean search (AND, OR, NOT)
• Wildcard (*) search.
• Implicit Wildcard search option. Enabling this option removes the need for the user to type * at the end of a keyword in order to run a wildcard query. This option is intended for people search only.
• 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. Each search tab can be configured with its own set of searchable properties, search result properties, sorting properties, drill down properties, quick filters, search scopes and search result actions. All of these settings can additonally be inherited or overwrited down through the SharePoint taxonomy, i.e. you may configure search tabs on the Farm level, the web application level, the site collection level all the way down to the individual site.
• Site dependent search box configuration.
• Complete web based configuration UI.   
• 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.
• Configurable action menu on results. Ontolica will include a fully configurable SharePoint 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.
• Sort results by custom property. Sort results by relevance, date, title, or any other property available in the search index.
• Document details page.
• Improved people search. Basically nicer thumbnails and more info displayed on each result.
• 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 dedicated configuration page where you can easily configure the various options of 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.
• Search Center site templates 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.