Programming Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, Second Edition (DV-MPS Programming)

Have no fear—Microsoft Site Server can help you solve this search dilemma. Site Server not only provides full-text indexing of the most common document types, including Microsoft Office documents, but it also supports a rich object library that you can use to build some powerful search applications for Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook.

In this chapter, we'll quickly look at the requirements for Site Server. We'll also look at the object model included with Site Server that makes building search applications easy. This object model extends the Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) object model, so if you're already familiar with ADO, you've got a head start on creating Site Server solutions.

What About Index Server?

There are some key differences between Microsoft Index Server and Site Server. Index Server is a good solution only if you're searching file-based content and don't need to search multiple data types, such as Exchange Server data. In contrast, Site Server can easily search such multiple data types. Furthermore, Site Server provides a better enterprise solution than Index Server.

Whereas both these products use the same search engine, Site Server has many features that Index Server doesn't have. These include a distributed, multithreaded crawler that can gather content from multiple data sources including file, Web (intranet and Internet), database, and Exchange Server data sources; and a configurable schema that you'll learn to use in your programming. (See the "Site Server Search Object Model" section later in this chapter.) Finally, you can disperse your Site Server catalog to multiple machines so that users can search it much more quickly.