One of the features that enterprises are anticipating in Windows 7 is its promised integration with SharePoint. Today Microsoft’s Engineering Windows 7 blog offered details of how Windows 7 federated search will let users search for documents stored all over the enterprise, including SharePoint. It will rely on OpenSearch v1.1 to let Windows 7 tap into search indexes already created and maintained on the server where the documents are stored.
OpenSearch is an open source tool distributed untier the Creative Commons License (Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic). It was originally developed by Amazon.com subsidiary A9 in 2005. The blog post explains:
“The model we came up with is similar to the way you add favorites from the web today. A web service can place a link to an .osdx file somewhere on their web page (see Channel 9’s search page for an example). The .osdx file is a simple XML file that uses the OpenSearch description document format to describe how to connect to the web service, and gives the web service some control of how the data is presented in Windows Explorer. When a person clicks on the link, Windows performs an ultra-lightweight install process that adds a search connector to that web service and places a link to that it in the Windows Explorer favorites.
“If you are an administrator in an enterprise environment, you will likely want to provide some pre-installed search connectors for your users to search the company intranet or a popular internal SharePoint site for example. You can do this by deploying the search connector (.searchconnector-ms) files to your users’ machines via typical deployment techniques such as imaging, group policy preferences or startup scripts. The beauty is that it’s just a simple XML configuration file and there’s no code that needs to get installed on their machines. It’s also possible to pin one of these as a link from the Start menu through group policy.”
The decision to use OpenSearch for federated search in Windows 7 is a natural one. Microsoft has tapped it to create federated search before. In December, Windows blogger Glenn Weadock investigated Microsoft’s latest methods for doing federated search, which at that time required using a search indexing product like Microsoft’s Search Server 2008 Express. He wrote:
“The ‘within limits’ part pertains to OpenSearch. TechNet, Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Yahoo (among several others) all support this standard, which specifies a format for returning search results much like an RSS feed, with XML. Google Web search, alas, does not do so directly – although I’m told you can do some coding and create a Sharepoint page that will process Google search results in such a way that MSSX can display them. (You can download .FLD files [Federated Location Definition] from Microsoft and import them into MSSX for certain OpenSearch sites that return results in the RSS/XML format that MSSX expects.)”
Interestingly, from an enterprise perspective, Google’s half-hearted support of OpenSearch is not that important. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox have long since used it. With the addition of Windows 7 support, users looking for stuff stored in enterprise servers now have plenty of client-based methods to find their corporate documents, images and the like — and without the extra expense of a seperate search appliance.
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