Microsoft Search Server Express 2008 - indexing different sources using custom protocol handlers
Hello!In this post I would like to talk about Search Server Express 2008 and integration of this great free product with other products. Search server express edition have a built-in providers for indexing many different types of sources such as file system, exchange public folders and, of course, full integration with WSS and indexing the most types of office documents. But what we have to do in situation where in our company we have some products which hold a lot of information and we want to consolidate all information and provide the ability to index it and perform the search? The answer is – write your own protocol handlers in order to index custom sources. It’s not easy to implement but the results takes your organization to another level of data availability and accessibility.
For example we already finished implementation of protocol handler for TFS source control where the search provides crawls the source control using TFS API and allow to perform search based on all solution(s) files content. The next step is to implement add-on for visual studio to provide the content-based search inside VS without getting all sources locally. I’m not sure if I’m going to publish the source but feel free to ask the questions.
The great example you can find in the John Kozell’s blog. The source can be downloaded from codeplex site.
Microsoft Search Server 2008 SDK also can be helpful.In conclusion I can say – custom protocol handlers are very powerful feature (but a bit hardest to implement J ). At this way you can index everything everywhere!
Cheers!