New seekers
- Article 25 of 26
- M-iD, November 2005
A new generation of search tools aims to help corporate users find valuable content and information buried deep on their hard drives.
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In the short term, this makes Google's software more attractive to the enterprise than Microsoft's. Indeed, the consumer, MSN branding on the Windows Desktop Search tool actually makes it less attractive to many IT managers. Andrews says that Google is now likely to develop considerable “mindshare” with its products and take the lead in the market.
In the long term, though, while centralisation of documents may be the biggest threat to desktop search tools' relevance in the enterprise, a far bigger threat is emerging from Microsoft itself: a better Windows desktop search function. WinFS, short for Windows File System, has been a long-touted holy grail of Microsoft's. Originally planned for Windows 95, the idea behind it is simple: replace the standard Windows file systems - FAT, FAT32 and NTFS - with a cut-down version of the SQL Server database. The virtues of this are the same virtues demonstrated by desktop search tools - a separate, indexed database of file system content and metadata - but, in this case, tied in at a much deeper level. More so, it will provide a standard API for developers to tie desktop search and metadata into their products.
Technical obstacles have caused Microsoft to scale back its ambitions over the years, but a beta version of WinFS that sits on top of NTFS (rather than replacing it) is now available. The eventual aim is for WinFS to be available for Windows XP, and installed by default in its replacement, Windows Vista.
Corporate upgrade cycles mean that it will be some years after Vista's current release date of 2007 before WinFS becomes the de facto search technology for most desktops. Microsoft also has few ties into existing server indexing technology planned, meaning integrated desktop, enterprise and web search tools will still have a place on many corporate desktops, even if pure desktop and web search tools don't.
Says Lee Phillips, FAST's director of intelligence solutions, “We've tied our personal search platform very closely into the Windows file system APIs. We think, whatever changes Microsoft makes, by combining enterprise search with desktop search, we're going to be in a very good position.”
The current war over desktop search is just the beginning of a much greater war over integrated enterprise search. Even if Google wins this battle, it won't have won that war. Despite many smaller companies like FAST already having realised where the real battles are, it's likely that dominance of the market will belong to either Microsoft or Google. Microsoft has the advantage of WinFS. But with integrated search already starting to become part of its long-term strategy and with a good portion of the mindshare, Google could take the ultimate prize from Microsoft yet.
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