Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express RC

Powerful enough to meet your search needs now and as they grow. Search doesn’t have to be complicated. You can deliver Search to your organization quickly and easily for free with Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express.
Main features:
Familiar search experience
- Search Center. Empower your people to quickly find the information they need through a familiar, web-style search interface and easy-to-use query syntax. Re-configure the layout of Search Center elements without writing any code.
- Content Summaries. Quickly browse textual summaries of content that appears in the context of your search terms.
- Hit Highlighting. Quickly spot where your search terms appear in search results and content summaries.
- Best Bets and Definitions. Highlights editorialized sites or definitions for common search terms likely to have a single authoritative answer.
- Query Correction. Receive helpful "Did you mean?" suggestions for misspelled queries.
- Duplicate Collapsing. Find the content youre looking for faster using more concise, structured search results with grouped duplicates.
- Filter by Property. Filter content by configurable properties, including common properties like document type, author, title, size, location, and date of creation or last modification.
- Filter by Language. Retrieve search results automatically biased by your language, or pre-select a language to filter your results against.
- Sort by Date. Retrieve the most current information related to your search query.
- Tabbed Search Results. Create visual containers in the Search Center for search results associated with your search scopes.
- E-mail / RSS Alerts. Stay on top of new information relevant to your work by subscribing to update notifications of your most common searches.
- Out-of-the-box Relevancy. Get relevant search results immediately, without extensive configuration using a ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Windows Live search.
- Localized Interface. Use a search experience available in 25 languages: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.
- Extensible Search Experience. Use powerful development tools (including Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer) to build customized query / results experiences and search-enabled applications on the SharePoint platform - from altering the appearance of your search site using XLST to enabling contextual actions you can take on search results.
Powerful enough to meet your needs now and as they grow
- No Pre-set Document Limits. Scale your search infrastructure to meet your evolving needs - however big or small they are - using the same search platform across a breadth of server hardware and SQL Server database configurations.
- Continuous Propagation Indexing. Improve the freshness of your search results with an index that incrementally updates itself as it crawls your information. Newly crawled content is propagated to the query servers so people can search it sooner, without having to wait for all content to be crawled.
- Out-of-the-box Indexing Connectors. Index content on file servers, web sites, Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Exchange Server public folders , and Lotus Notes repositories. Find additional Indexing Connectors in the Search Connector Gallery. More Information
- Indexing Connector API. Extend your searches by indexing information in 3rd-party data repositories, applications, and services.
- Proxy Server Configuration. Configure proxy server settings to use when crawling information on external sites.
- Federated Search Connectors. Federate your searches to indexes in other data repositories, applications, and services using the Open Search standard. Quickly import or export your federated locations using packaged Federated Location Definition (.FLD) files. Find Federated Search Connectors in the Search Connector Gallery. More Information
- Trigger Words. Configure key phrases that trigger a targeted search at information within a federated index.
- Federated Results Customization. Optionally customize the appearance of your federated search results using XSL stylesheets.
- Internet Search Integration. Use the same search query experience to retrieve internet search results from providers supporting the OpenSearch standard via Federated Search Connectors.
- Search iFilters. Index a wide variety of documents and file types using an interface common across Windows Desktop Search, Windows Vista, SharePoint, and SQL Server.
- Search Connector Gallery. Reference Microsofts online gallery of 3rd-party federated search connectors, indexing connectors, and iFilters.
- Relevance Tuning. Retrieve the most relevant results across a diverse set of 3rd-party line-of-business systems and content repositories from a single search query. Use a ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Windows Live Search. More Information
- Metadata Property Mappings. Identify custom metadata properties you want indexed and make them part of the search experience as part of search results, advanced search options, and search scopes.
- Search Scopes. Define custom sets of search results based on flexible rules. For example, define a scope that matches information having certain properties (like "people") or from certain content sources (like a specific web site).
- Authoritative Sources. Identify and rank information sources that are most likely to provide relevant results. Demote non-authoritative sources.
- Definitions. Set editorial text that should appear whenever a key word or phrase is used in a search query.
- Best Bets. Recommend sites that should be returned as top results when a search query matches a key word or phrase.
- Key words. Define words and phrases that trigger the return of definitions and best bets. Define and audit key word owners, review dates, and expirations for terms that are time sensitive.
- Synonyms. List related terms that should return identical pre-defined results as your key words.
- Common Desktop Search Infrastructure. Use a search infrastructure that effectively scales from the desktop, allowing components like iFilters and Indexing Connectors used for desktop search to also be used on the server. Learn more about Windows Desktop Search.
Easy to configure, easy to maintain
- Streamlined Installation. Simplified experience makes it easy to get an enterprise search infrastructure running in your environment quickly.
- Unified Administration Dashboard. Review common administrative tasks, monitor system and crawl status, and configure your search settings in a single, configurable view. More Information
- Crawl Scheduling. Configure data repositories, applications, and services you want indexed and specify crawl schedules for when full or incremental crawls should be performed.
- Crawler Impact Rules. Limit the performance impact of the search indexer on specific content sources by setting caps on the frequency of or interval between requests.
- Server name mappings. Transpose intranet and extranet site addresses.
- Index Monitoring. Monitor crawl timings, durations, errors, and average performance over 1-week and 1-month periods for each content source.
- Crawl Logs. Review detailed status reports on content crawled by the search index - filterable by location, date / time, content source, and status.
- System Event Logging. Track system events and roll them up into Microsoft Operations Manager reports.
- Query and Results Reporting. Review your most common searches, queries with no results, top destination pages, query volume, click-through rates, and most-clicked best bets. Recognize not only the most popular searches, but also the least successful - and improve them by adding new Best Bets and content sources.
- Enterprise-ready Backup and Restore. Schedule or perform ad-hoc backups / restores of your configuration data and search index, on premise or remotely.
- Security-Trimmed Results. Ensure people only find information they should have access to by automatically trimming search results based on the identity of the user at query time. Access control lists (ACLs) for content on file shares, SharePoint sites, and Lotus Notes databases are automatically captured at index time.
- Secure Federated Relationships. Set global or user-level security settings for your federated search relationships - supporting basic, NTLM, Kerberos, forms-based, and cookie-based authentication mechanisms.
- Crawl Rules. Specify unique crawl inclusion / exclusion behaviors and authentication credentials for specific content sources
- Single-item Index Removal. Quickly remove sensitive content from the search index without having to re-index a content source. Crawl exclusion rules are automatically created to ensure this content isnt re-indexed.
- Breadth of Enterprise Search Solutions. Minimize your investment risk by betting on a common search infrastructure that offers solutions that will grow with you - from a quick, easy, and no-cost search server to a sophisticated business productivity Infrastructure. Compare Microsoft’s enterprise search offerings.
- Technical Resources. Make use of Microsofts library of enterprise search technical resources and articles on TechNet and MSDN.
- Community Discussion Groups. Connect with your peers who are implementing Microsoft enterprise search solutions.
- Partner Ecosystem. Take advantage of Microsofts broad partner ecosystem with expertise in extending and implementing enterprise search solutions.
System requirements:
- Processor: 2.5 gigahertz (GHz) (minimum)
- Memory: 2 gigabytes (GB) RAM (minimum)
- Hard disk: NTFS-formatted partition with 3 GB of free space (minimum)
- Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 with ASP.NET 2.0 enabled
- Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
- Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation Runtime Components .
Note: Search Server 2008 Express can be installed on one computer only. It supports an unlimited number of Web front-end servers, but only one application server