ANTenna Blog -- Hardware & Software

Microsoft is venturing deeper into enterprise search territory with its release of Search Server 2008 Express, a stand alone business search tool. A release candidate is available now as a free download.

The company states: "In delivering Search Server Express, Microsoft has taken the enterprise class search capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and made them available as a stand-alone server for free. Search Server Express is designed to be easy to configure and administer, allowing IT professionals to go from download to search in as little as 30 minutes. In addition, Search Server Express has no preset document limits, so it will scale to meet a company's evolving needs. For users, Search Server Express provides advanced security and easy access to relevant, action-oriented results using a familiar Web search experience."

Microsoft plans a paid version that is essentially the same, but is licensed to run on more than one physical server. That will be launched next year and Microsoft said it will announce pricing for that product then.

According to InformationWeek, Microsoft said it has found that "the average information worker does 20 searches for information every day and spends 9.5 hours every week just looking for stuff. Of the 6 million businesses -- that's everything from mom-and-pops to Wal-Mart -- in the United States, Microsoft said only 1 percent use any business search products."

IW adds: "Business search offerings today generally fall into one of two buckets. Either they are complicated and expensive but powerful, or cheap and easy, but relatively limited in scale. Some high-end search platforms from companies like Autonomy can cost several hundred thousand dollars and take months to set up. Meanwhile, cheap and free platforms from Yahoo and Google have artificial caps on the numbers of documents they can search, lack real security, or are too much like Internet search engines, rather than having businesses in mind. Microsoft group product manager Jared Spataro said Search Server hopes to bridge that gap."

As CNET notes, Microsoft's is not the only search option for small and midsize businesses. "IBM already offers a free enterprise search tool in collaboration with Yahoo. Google is also investing in enterprise search, as are niche firms such as Autonomy, Fast Search & Transfer, and Endeca."

But with Microsoft making a serious push, business search should start getting even more interesting for small and midsize businesses.

What do you do for enterprise search? Let us know.