Microsoft SharePoint(TM) Portal Server 2001 Resource Kit (Examples & Explanations Series)

The world's leading suite of productivity software, Microsoft Office helps you complete common business tasks, including word processing, e-mail, presentations, data management and analysis, and much more.

If you are an Office user and you want to work from your desktop, use Office XP search. Office XP enables you to search not only the local hard disk but also file shares and SharePoint Portal Server computers. The following list describes the components of Office XP.

• Data access. If you enable Indexing Service on a computer running Windows 2000, Indexing Service creates an index of local disks. On computers running Microsoft Windows NT^® version 4, Windows 98, or Windows Millennium Edition, Microsoft Office XP provides a version of the search engine used in SharePoint Portal Server for local disk crawling. You must choose to activate Indexing Service or the Office search index engine. If you do not enable indexing, Office XP provides a slower, non-indexed form of search.
• User Interface. Office XP provides a search task pane accessible from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
• Advanced Features. The task pane provides federated search of the user's local hard drives, remote servers through Indexing Services, SharePoint Portal Server computers, SharePoint Team Services sites (which use Indexing Service for their full-text search feature), and Outlook mail (PST files or Exchange mailboxes). A query broker component dispatches search commands to the search providers for each of these stores.
• Extensibility and programmability. Office applications can program to the search query broker through an API that is similar to the FindFast API.