Right on the heels of our FC.MetadataExtractor 2.0 release shortly before Christmas we're working hard on getting a fun product out the door: FC.ImageSearchResults. It'll probably be another couple of weeks before we hit beta 1, but I thought I should already mention it here.

 

All the metadata that can be unleashed by the FC.MetadataExtractor product will be available to search on if the FC.ImageSearchResults solution is installed. And what's best, the solution comes with a custom searchresult page that displays those images nicely with thumbnails and metadata that makes sense for images. I'll blog more about this as we get closer to the public beta release.

 

As always with our product efforts we're aiming to support both MOSS (the commercial product) as well as WSS 3. This time I am especially happy to tell that there will also be support for a free version of SharePoint: while search in WSS 3 simply sucks, the Search Server Express 2008 (SSX) product (that simply can be installed "over" an existing WSS 3 installation) has all the bells and whistles to serve as the basis for our search solution.

 

If you run WSS 3 and haven't looked at SSX yet ...I highly recommend you do so ASAP!

 

The object model of the libraries that get installed with the SSX "upgrade" for WSS 3 have everything we need for our solution. Even the Search user interface that is added to the Central Administration is quite nice. However, there was one thing that was missing: a link to the page to manage the so-called "Shared Scopes". Our solution installs a Share Scope called "All Images" that allows to search across the entire farm and while we do that programmatically we of course prefer it to be visible to the administrator, so what is installed is transparent.

 

Well, the respective admin page for managing the scopes is actually installed. Just the link is missing. So you can get to that page simply using this link:

 

http://<server name>:<central admin port>/ssp/admin/_layouts/viewscopesssp.aspx?mode=ssp