One of the limitations with Windows SharePoint Services search is that the search at the top of your site it is limited to the site collection in terms of the data it is able to retrieve. This is frustrating if you have designed and deployed best practice methods for managing multiple site collections to better manage your data, recovery and content segregation.
What this meant to some users whom deployed several site collections is that they had to go to each ‘top level site’ and search from there to get results or purchase a 3rd party tool. It also didn’t search other storage repositories, web sites, file shares, etc.
Well no more, with the release of Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express (SSE): More details here from Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/default.aspx
Oh, and by the way, it is FREE!
There are limitations with the express product, one of which is that it can only be installed on 1 machine, hence not scalable for farm deployments, and recommend you review the detailed planning considerations/upgrade paths before you deploy as adding such powerful indexing/search capabilities will create large index files that need to be managed and considered as part of your environment.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb891933.aspx
Regards,
WorkShares Team.
Technorati Tags: wss,sharepoint,search.
