Our consumer product went into beta in December, and what happened during that process was that we hear from a lot of corporations interesting in having that functionality available to them on a broad scale, said product manager Justin Osmer.
The firm is planning to strip out some consumer-focused features from the MSN-branded toolbar, and add some enterprise features, such as the ability to deploy, configure and manage the software centrally, Osmer said.
One of the things they would like is the ability to have control over what appears in the drop-down menus, Osmer said. The consumer version links to services like Hotmail and MSN Spaces, which may not always be enterprise-friendly.
The company is also looking enabling the corporate software to search file servers and public folders, in addition to the client, Osmer said. Unlike MSN web search, Microsoft’s desktop search is based on components of the SharePoint collaboration server.
We still don’t know which brand it will be, we still don’t know how it whether it will be positioned as a revenue generator, Osmer said. He added that Microsoft still plans to make search a core feature of the Longhorn operating system, set to ship late 2006.
The MSN Desktop Toolbar integrates with Office applications and Internet Explorer, and uses spare processor time to pre-index documents it finds on the hard drive, enabling searches to be executed instantly, much faster than the default Windows search function.
In the post-beta release, the company has also added a preview pane, and deeper integration with Office, so users can view and interact with documents they find more quickly that before, from the search interface.
With its enterprise server software, Microsoft has often partnered with independent software vendors, including Fast Search & Transfer and MondoSoft, to improve its search functionality.
Microsoft has been pretty good at building APIs we can build on, said John Lervik, Fast’s chief executive. I believe a solid desktop indexing service would be something we would like to build on top of.
