Vista Search Syntax

In between some meetings today I did some reading around Windows Desktop Search and Vista Search.  Although its not something we currently ‘officially’ supply, we’re seeing more people using WDS and Google Desktop.  Not really a problem but when people start indexing the network shares our file servers and network don’t like it much…

So anyway I was reading up on how best to manage WDS, and it turns out its nice and simple as MS have provided an .adm file for Group Policy.  During my reading though I found this good article on the search syntax supported by WDS and Vista. 

The syntax is quite intuitive, and there are a surprising number of filters there, so you can do some pretty complex searches quite easily.

Here’s a few examples, but check out the full list here.

Property

Example

Function

author:name

author:patrick

Finds items with patrick in the author property.

from:name

 

from:patrick

Finds items with patrick in either fromName OR fromAddress, since "from" is a property name for both fromName and fromAddress.
Kind:type

kind:meetings

 Finds meetings

Date

date

date:lastweek

Album

album

album:"greatest hits"

Messenger for Mac

I’ve just been reading over on Johann Kruse’s blog that Messenger for Mac 7 has been released.  I guess for most people the big news for most people will be the usual Live Messenger support, but if you’re an Enterprise IT guy like me its the Office Communication Server (OCS)support that’s interesting.

One of the challenges I’ve got at work at the moment is how best to integrate Macs into our (mostly) Windows environment.  Before we tackle the big problems we’re focusing on providing access to our basic services – email, file and IM. 

At the the moment we’re using Live Communication Server rather than OCS, but hopefully we’ll be moving to OCS over the next year or so.  One of the big drivers for that migration is OCS’s multi-party audio and video conferencing.  Having a Mac client that supports this is a huge bonus.

Maybe it’s time I got myself a Mac of my own.

New Office Labs site

Another thank you to Steve Clayton for pointing out that the Office Labs site has gone live.  It looks like there are some great tools to try out there.

I’m a big fan of Tablet PC’s and having just installed InkSeine, I have to say it’s very cool.  I use OneNote quite a bit to take notes in meetings, so apps like this always catch my eye.  The GIU is easy to use and I like access to search results.  I can easily see myself missing some of the functionality when I use the full blown OneNote app – if you’re using a pen why would you ever need drop down menus?  There are a few things missing at the moment, but hopefully they’ll get added over time.

If only HP would make an up to date version of their old TC1100 slate tablet!

The other stand-out thing for me was SharePointPedia.   I know there was talk some time back about making Sharepoint the way MS presented communities for products.  The idea being each product team  would have a Sharepoint site under sharepoint.microsoft.com with forums etc.  I’m not sure how far that initiative got, the only other site I’ve seen there is for Sharepoint itself, but the ‘pedia site has always had pretty good content. 

With this sort of site I guess a lot depends on how many people find it and use it.  Having worked with SharePoint in the past and seeing how quickly best practice evolves and changes, any resource MS can use to speak directly to customers has to be good. 

It’s good to see this sort of ‘labs’ stuff out there in the open.  Hopefully there’s more to come.

Why spoil the good work?

As you might have spotted, due to the work I’m doing at the moment I keep a pretty close eye on Microsoft and what its doing.  Over the past week or so I think thing they’ve had a fairly good week, news about the Live Mesh platform has started to arrive and it looks great, most of the comment I’ve read about it has been very positive.

So why go and do this?  ‘Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys‘. It looks like MS are decommissioning the infrastructure that support the DRM used for music bought on the old MSN Music site.  What genius made that decision?  How expensive can it be to keep those servers running?  Surely they’re never going to get busier or require scaling now MSN Music is gone.  Given all the free storage and hosting MS is throwing about chopping off this service can’t really improve the bottom line can it?  All this will do is generate bad press and piss people off… it seems crazy.  Oh well.