Here's something worth celebrating: Microsoft Search Server 2008 (MSS) and Microsoft Search Server Express 2008 (MSSX) were announced almost exactly 1 year ago - November 7th, 2007 - and the release candidate of MSSX made available for download.

(OK, I'm a few days late, but I was at TechEd EMEA, in Barcelona - which is still going on in its Dev edition - so maybe we could consider it a two-week-long birthday party...)

In any case, Michael Gannotti didn't forget, and posted a Video blog entry reminding folks of what a great deal MSSX still is. For those who don't have the bandwidth, or don't want to deal with a video right now, here's the scoop.

Search Server and Search Server Express are essentially the Enterprise Search functionality of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, enhanced and released as stand-alone products on top of WSS (which they will install if it isn't already present). With the recent Infrastructure Updates, Microsoft has brought MOSS up to functional parity, and the two releases are now in sync. The really great news is, the production version MSSX is still available for download at no charge!

Considering what you would pay for the little blue box (let alone the yellow box) from a certain "appliance" vendor (let's call them "Brand G"), that's a super deal. Even better is that with MSS/MSSX you don't have to worry about hard-coded limits on the number of items you can crawl. The only hard limit on the free version (MSSX) is that it is limited to a single application server. But compared to the aforementioned appliances, which are typically just one box anyway, that isn't a huge limit. Of course, just how much CPU, RAM, and SQL storage you have available to that one application server will have an impact on capacity, but that isn't a limit in the product itself. (The included SQL Server Express edition does have a 4GB/database size limit, which you might hit at something in the neighborhood of 400,000 documents, which would cost almost $10,000 in blue-box land for a 300,000 document hard-cap. Use an external full version of SQL Server to effectively eliminate the document limit!)

Naturally, if you want the kind of resilience and user access scaling that a multiple-application-server configuration provides (and you can't get in a blue box, or in any but the most expensive yellow configurations, from "Brand G"), you can go to either MOSS, or the full "pay" version of MSS.

A Word of Caution

As great as MSS and MSSX are, I would be remiss if I didn't add this little bit of advice. No Enterprise Search solution is truly "plug and play" - if you want to get it right. Sure, you can point the engines at your web sites and file shares, enter queries, and find documents. And that is almost certainly an improvement over no search at all - probably a vast one. But don't let that lull you into a false sense of contentment.

To get the most out of the system, you need to have a plan in place. Your information should be organized, tagged, and categorized in accordance with an Enterprise metadata topology. In addition, no search engine can find what it wasn't told to crawl. That doesn't make an engine bad, it just means you should stop and think. Bill English, author of The SharePoint Administrator's Companion, and founder of the SharePoint training company MindSharp, has recently posted a blog series on some of the cultural factors you should consider in order to get the most "Findability" (the real goal) out of a technical Enterprise Search solution.