Windows Search 4.0 Administrator's Guide

Windows Search 4.0 has a number of new features and enhancements that can help IT professionals deploy and maintain desktop search:

• Improvements in performance and stability of the indexer
• Fuller complement of Group Policy settings, available on all supported operating systems
• Fast sorting and grouping of results in Windows Explorer
• Improvements in indexing online e-mail
• Ability to index delegate mailboxes for online e-mail
• Support for indexing encrypted documents of local file systems
• Expanded ability to do fast remote queries of file shares, including on Windows XP and Server 2003
• Automatic indexing of shared folders
• Improvements in previews for earlier, supported operating systems (Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP)

Windows Search 4.0 extends the ability to search across remote desktops. Previously, only Windows Vista users could query recognizable indexes on remote Vista computers; now, WS4 enables users to query remote computers running any supported operating system. Remote querying includes the following features:

• Queries work across all supported OSes (Windows XP, Server 2003, Home Server, and Vista).
• All shared NTFS folders are automatically indexed (excludes all FAT file systems).
• All shared, and therefore indexed, locations can be remotely queried.

The location on the remote computer must be shared and it must be indexed. With Group Policy, administrators can control whether shared locations are automatically indexed.

Querying from Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008

To query a remote computer, users use Windows Explorer to browse the shared, indexed folder on another machine and enter their searches in Explorer’s search box. If the location is not indexed, then Vista falls back to a slower GREP search instead of WS4.

Querying from Windows XP or Windows Server 2003

To query a remote computer, users select the location from their All Locations menu and enter their search query as usual. First, of course, they must add the remote location to their search scope:

1. From the Windows Search UI, click the All Locations menu and select Add Location.
2. Enter the full path of the location, or browse to the location.

Once added, the new location appears at the bottom of the All Locations menu allowing users to select that location to search in. In the same way, users can remove a location by selecting Remove Location. If the remote location is not indexed, a message appears advising users that the location cannot be searched.