Monday 30 July 2012

One Little Feature Where In-House/On-Premises Kills Cloud

This is a tweaked post that was made to the Yahoo SBS2K forum.

***

This is how in-house based Search works when set up properly:

  • Server side:
    • Windows Server 2008 RTM/R2+ hosts files.
    • Win2K8 RTM/R2 set up with Search and indexes file shares.
  • Client side (Win7+):
    • Library created and called whatever (we use SharedFolders)
    • Shared Folders on above server(s) added to library.
      • Use Index Options to add additional folders.
    • Outlook 2010 set up and updated on client.
    • Can add as many mailboxes as allowed by admin.
  • Search process:
    • Click START
    • Type "Cloud or not - comparison ... " (SBS2K topic for this post)
      • As an example, this thread would start showing up in the results for e-mail hosted in Outlook.
      • Now, if we were also shipping Excel/Word/PP/Publisher files back and forth those would show up in the search results under FOLDERS.

And now the clincher?

  • Type "Philip" in the search field and the following results:
    • Any e-mail to/from name
    • Any contacts with that name.
    • Any Word/Excel/PP/Publisher file title with name
    • _ANY_ Word/Excel/PP/Publisher file with name IN it

That's the biggest advantage an in-house solution has over Cloud. Period.

Search is the one killer-app that saves users gobs of time in a year. That translates to a lot of $$$ for the company in efficiencies gained.

As a result, our in-house/on-premises solutions become a lot more attractive. :)

IMNSHO, working remotely via RemoteApp or OWA feels wrong. I can't search for things as quick as I can when working from a connected desktop. If there is a need to search one needs to jump between OWA and SharePoint Online in order to find it. That is a huge drawback.

Now, with Server 2012 we get DirectAccess. Guess what?

SEARCH ANYWHERE!

In-house just took a _giant_ leap forward. :D

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

1 comment:

Doug H. said...

Hi Philip,

You're spot on with this post. Fully indexed search was one of the original ways that I made the business case for Server 2008R2 in our organization.

We use the Server 2008R2 indexed search over VPNs now and it works surprisingly well, but DirectAccess in Server 2012 stands to simply things for users to make search just as powerful inside or outside of the office automatically.