Windows Search 4.0 Released – Faster, better and happier enterprise player…

LiveSide - News blog - Windows Search 4.0 released

“Having released a public beta of Windows Search 4.0 back at the end of March, a final version has now been released today (thanks Brandon!). As we’ve talked about previously, this update for Windows (XP, Vista, Server and WHS) upgrades the search technologies built in to the operating system. Specifically the new features include:

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As we mentioned at the launch of the beta, while this is an update aimed at the enterprise market, there are still some significant benefits here for the home user. Notably much faster indexing with reduced resource usage, along with shorter loading times for search results.

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Description of Windows Search 4.0 and the Multilingual User Interface Pack for Windows Search 4.0

Windows Search 4.0 includes the following improvements:

• Support for indexing encrypted documents of local file systems
• Reduced affect on Microsoft Exchange when you index e-mail in online mode, and there is no local cache (.ost)
• Support for indexing online delegate mailboxes
• Support for client-to-client remote query to shared indexed locations
• Improved indexing performance
• Faster previewer updates for Windows XP
• Per-user Group Policy settings
• Windows software updates for Watson errors

Support for the following new enterprise Group Policy objects:

Computer policies

• Prevent adding Universal Naming Convention (UNC) locations to index from Control Panel
• Prevent customizing indexed locations in Control Panel
• Prevent automatically adding shared folders to the index
• Allow for indexing of encrypted files
• Disable indexer back-off
• Prevent clients from querying the index remotely
• Allow for indexing of online delegate mailboxes
• Prevent adding user
• Specified locations to the All Locations menu
• Enable throttling for online mail indexing

Per-user policies

• Prevent adding UNC locations to the index from Control Panel
• Prevent customizing indexed locations in Control Panel
• Prevent indexing certain paths
• Default indexed paths
• Default excluded paths

Windows Search 4.0 packages include the following:

The Group Policy template (Search.adm or Search.admx /l) for managing Group Policy objects that span multiple versions of Windows Desktop Search and Windows Search

The Add-in for Files on Microsoft Networks for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 packages
This add-in is described in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

918996 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918996/) Availability of the Windows Desktop Search add-in for Files on Microsoft Networks

This add-in lets Windows Search index redirected "My Documents" folders. This add-in also lets Windows Search index shared items on remote networks. By default, this add-in is included for supported 32-bit operating systems.

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Windows Search 4.0 supports the following operating systems:

• 32-bit versions of Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
• 64-bit versions of Windows Vista with SP1
• 32-bit versions of Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or a later version
• 64-bit versions of Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or a later version
• 32-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 with SP2
• 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 with SP2
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Home Server

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I like better and faster…