I have written some notes from a lecture about how Microsoft is implementing search in Windows 7. It is impressive. These notes will be edited as soon as I am back from the conference. If you haven’t started using Windows Search 4.0, please do. If you are an IT pro, please deploy it! If you as me have used BeOS in the past, be thrilled …

Introduction

Finding and organising files. “My stuff” and the corporate cloud. Is indexing gonna take my machine away, is it so heavy that it is gonna slow my work down?

Using Information in the Enterprise

Information workers (IWs) routinely look for information

• Search performed within a task or goal
• Targets a know, familiar set of sources
• Data is increasingly becoming distributed on the network
• Data found through browse and search activities

Finding Data in the Enterprise

Situation today it is hard to find and use data

Hard to provide and manage access to information

Windows 7 Search for Enterprise

Information is easy to find and use

Ease of management for data access scenarios

• Provide consistent access to corporate data

Utilize data and IT resources to their fullest

Win 7: Search and Preview

UX for easy finding. Help users be productive when looking for data

Relevance indicators in the UI

Search Input Suggestions

Selecting the right Search Scope

Demo – Search and different view are amazing fast. Feels like sitting in front of a machine running BeOS! Finally Windows is getting a working indexing. Microsoft’s Libraries technology is gonna make us a lot more productive. No longer will be spending hours on the look for a specific document. We can now use keyword serches, by tagging our documents.

You can build queries as in Terminal in BeOS, but directly in the search window. No pop down menus needed.

The deault libraries might no be the ones that you want for your organization, and you can therefor create extra folders in Library. And you then build up what folders on what locations you want to search through. It makes Search smart to the folders that you have included in your defined Search/Library. Hit Win-key and E or F.

Library Locations

Fat drives, NAS, removable media (DVDs) and some share technologies.

Search Federation With OpenSearch

Search for data, regardless of location

Search through the corporate portal

MSW People

MSW Search

Metadata is shown down in the panel

Demoes – A few preview problem really not worth mentioning. Search in Win 7 is already very mature.

http://www.opensearch.org

Open Search Standard (now v1.1) and OpenSearch Description Document

Open Search has support for RSS and Atom. A new way of consuming RSS feed. IMPRESSIVE.

Rich Client experience: Preview, metadata, drag and drop, thumbnails, hit highlighting

Windows Authentication

Accept URL queries as defined by the OSDX.

One of the first applications to use the search connectors that will be introduced with Windows 7, is Flickr Search Connectr.

Useful References

Please visit OpenSearch. More references will be added.