My Digital Life - Technology, cars, and other nonsense

Integrating Enterprise Search into Windows 7

One of the things I like about Vista and Windows 7 is the way search has been integrated into almost every part of the interface. Sure it’s not something you immediately start using, but for me at least it’s really grown into something that I use more than once a day to help find information and save me time.

On top of the ability to search the local disk, one of the great things about the Vista/2008/7/R2 windows family is the ability to federate search across a number of sources.

What does that mean? Search federation allows Windows to query against remote data stores without the need to index those locations itself. Imagine that you wanted to search your SharePoint sites for a document, and you wanted to do it from within Windows. One way to do this would be to get Windows to index all of the SharePoint content and keep its own index. That’s not very efficient though, if there is more than one computer each one would need a copy, so in an enterprise that’s a whole lot of duplication.

With federated search you enter your search query in one place, in this case Windows, and that query is then forwarded on to the other systems which have indexed content. They then execute the query against their own index and send back the results. Those results are then displayed back in the original application as if they were searched and indexed locally. The benefit of this is that it’s much more efficient, each source can have it’s own index and search tool (provided it supports federation of searching) and only the query and results are passed over the network.

So, how do we make use of this? Well Windows 7 supports search federation in the form of OpenSearch. Fortunately quite a few different search engines support this, but for the sake of this post I’ll use SharePoint as I’m guessing that one of the more common data sources people will want to search.

What it looks like
Before I get into how this can be setup and configured, here’s a screenshot of what it looks like in action:

This is a screenshot from Windows Explorer on a Win7 a test machine I was using today. First you can see that there’s an addition to the Favourites for your new search. When you enter something into the search box, the results from the SharePoint location are returned directly into Explorer Window. If you select one of the files and have the preview pane turned on you get a live preview of the document (the preview pane is something else I really find useful!).

In addition to the view above, you can pin your new search to the bottom of any other results… but more on that later.

So how do you set this up? Well there’s the manual setup and an automated setup using Active Directory Group Policy.

The Manual Way
For manually setting up a new search location you can create a new OpenSearch Description file which you can then double click to install. An OpenSearch Description file (.osdx) is an XML document that tells Windows where to send the search terms and how the results should be formatted. These are fully document here, but I’ve included an example below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/">
<ShortName>SharePoint Search</ShortName>
<Description>Search SharePoint</Description>
<Url type="application/rss+xml" template="http://yoursharepointsite.com/searchcentre/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={searchTerms}&amp;start={startIndex}&amp;cnt={count}"/>
<Url type="text/html" template="http://yoursharepointsite.com/searchcentre/Pages/Results.aspx?k={searchTerms}&amp;page={startPage}&amp;cnt={count}"/>
<ms-ose:ResultsProcessing format="application/rss+xml">
<ms-ose:LinkIsFilePath>-1</ms-ose:LinkIsFilePath>
</ms-ose:ResultsProcessing>
</OpenSearchDescription>

When you double click on this .osdx file, Windows uses the information it contains to create two new files. The first is a Search Connector (a .searchconnector-ms file) in the “%userprofile%/searches” directory, and the second is a shortcut to it in the “%userprofile%/links” directory. It’s this shortcut that appears in the ‘Favorites’ folder in to Screenshot above.

The Automated Way

The simplest way to deploy the new search settings out to a number of computers is though Group Policy.

As the search config is stored within the Search Connector, all you need to do is deploy the .searchcconnector-ms file and shortcut out to your target computers. There are a few ways to do this, but personally I’d use Group Policy Preferences. This will give you a good level of control over the targeting of the files, and easily allow you to adjust the settings over time. You could also use things like logon scripts.

You can configure Group Policy Preferences to deploy files with the User Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings > Files area of a GPO. You’ll have to do this as a user based policy as the files must be copied into the User Profile, if you copied the files as a computer policy it would apply before a user was logged on so they would end up in the wrong place.

Within the Files Preferences, you have to specify a source file location and a target location. For the source location I would tend to use the Netlogon share for your domain (//domain.com/netlogon/) as a copy will be on every domain controller and usually therefore local to the end users. The target locations should be the same as those described in the manual steps above:

Search Connector: %userprofile%/searches/File.searchconnector-ms

Shortcut: %userprofile%/links/SearchTitle.lnk

As well as the source and target info, you also need to set a few of the other options. The first is ‘Run in logged on user’s security context (user policy option)’ as this will ensure that the file is copied in context of the user logging on.

You may also wish to consider whether to set the ‘Remove this item when it is no longer applied’ options so that the files are removed if you decide to remove the policy.

Adding Links to Your Search Connector

Following the steps above will add your new search location into the Favourites folder and allow you to search against it. You can however also add your new Search Connector to both the ‘Search Again’ links that appear at the bottom of any search results, and to the Start Menu. This is done by configuring the ‘Pin Libraries or Search Connectors to the ‘Search Connectors’ to the ‘Search Again’ links and the Start Menu’ Group Policy that can be found within the User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer area.

I hope this has been useful!

Disk2VHD: Convert a live disk into a VHD

A couple of guys at work pointed this out to me last week, so I’m a bit late posting about it, but I think it’s worth mentioning all the same.

Disk2VHD is a great little tool from Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, two of the guys behind Sysinternals (now part of Microsoft). What it does is is pretty simple, copy a physical hard disk into a virtual hard disk (VHD). There are loads of tools to do this, but what makes Disk2VHD different is that it can run on a live, online disk. To do this is makes use of the Volume Snapshot capability that’s be in Windows since WinXP to create a point-in-time snapshots.

Being able to create a VHD from an online disk opens up a couple of news possibilities, for example it would make a pretty good tool for creating bootable backups of machines. In fact when I get a chance I’ll be seeing if I can knock up an automated way of creating a VHD backup of an XP computer before it’s trashed and upgraded to Windows 7. If it works, combined with Windows 7’s native boot to VHD functionality it’ll be a pretty good way of providing an instant recovery back to a users old XP computer. Hopefully they’d never need it, but it may be worth the effort to add an extra level confidence.

Check out Disk2VHD here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina F1 circuit

This might show me up as a bit of an F1 geek, but I thought I’d pass on this video of the new Yas Marina circuit in Abu Dhabi.

It looks like a great track, it’s got a good mix of corners – 21 in fact – and a long 1.2km straight. In fact I’d really like to drive it, I reckon it has a nice flow to it if that makes sense. And lets face it how many tracks have a pit lane exit that’s a tunnel?

The video is of Bruno Senna driving a 2 seater F1 car, and I originally saw it on James Allens blog (a good source for F1 news).

3D Television… it’s actually quite good.

Yesterday I spent the day at BT’s Adastral research centre talking about new and upcoming technology. BT do a lot beyond selling phones and broadband, and the day was focused on highlighting areas of technology that we could use in come form or another.

They’ve got a huge range of stuff there, we covered everything from their 21st Century Network project though to a fascinating bit of kit that can pick up sound from fibre optic cameras. One of the less business focus demos though was a couple of 3D televisions.

I’ve seen a couple of 3D movies recently and have been pretty impressed with the effect. Even so, I wasn’t so sure about the idea of 3D TV. Maybe it’s because most of the movies are animated, I wasn’t sure what live action would be like. Having seen it in the flesh though I’m really quite looking forward to the prospect. The 3D effect is just as real as at the cinema, but what surprised me was how well it seemed to work with normal real life scenes.

Te demo had a couple of different scenes, from the predictable action movie type stuff through to rugby games and and an F1 car driving round Mugello. It works very very well for the sports sections, it’s no wonder Sky are so keen on launching a 3D channel next year.

Ok, so you have to wear glasses, but they’re nowhere near as bad as the only red/green ones you used to get as a kid. You’d rather watch without I’m sure, but even though I only had a quick demo I reckon the glasses are worth the sacrifice. Oh, and for normal 2D programmes the TV works just like a normal HDTV.

How does it work… well from what I can gather, glasses are circularly polarised, clockwise for the right eye and anti- clockwise for the left. The screen then alternately projects the frames for the right and left eyes, switching a filter for each.

However it works I’m looking forward to seeing what the 3D Star Wars movies will be like, and what games developers do once they get their hands on it.

Designing the interface for a newspaper

Image from the iA blog

Thanks to SwissMiss I just stumbled on this post from Oliver Reichenstein from Information Architects about their pitch for the redesign of Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger.

In the end their pitch didn’t win, but they had some great ideas in there. I especially like their idea of highlighting the key words in an article in blue to make scanning stories easier. They would also use those keywords to simplify finding the same articles on the website.

In a world where newspapers are rapidly loosing ground to web based competition, ideas like these might help make the old paper media more relevant to readers who have grown used to the web.

I thought the article was an interesting read.

In this image you can just about make out the blue highlighted keywords (Images from the iA blog)