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Tools / Federated Search




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Now I want to talk about something that's new in Windows 7 called Federated Search, okay and I'm just going to give you enough information here to kind of raise some awareness if you will. We're not going to go too deep into this but you're going to hear a lot about this and if you've been out in any of the forums and if you're looking in any of the magazines out in the bookstores about Windows 7 you're going to hear about Federated Search and this can be really cool and as a matter of fact, we're just now starting to scratch the surface. Now let's talk about what Federated Search is and what it can do for you. In Windows Vista you had the enhanced Desktop Search feature and one of the things that you've noticed as more and more data makes its way onto our PCs, even our laptops now, you know, we have 3 and 400 Gigabytes and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger on the hard disks, so we have tons of data out there that we need to find stuff in and it's getting harder and harder to find everything. Now we've got a new problem and that is, is that our data extends far beyond our PC. It can be in shared folders on a server, it can be in remote storage locations out on the Internet, we have data about ourselves out in things like Twitter, Ebay, YouTube, Flickr, all these various social type functioning websites out there on the Internet and again, how do you find everything in those? Well, this is exactly what Federated Search is going to open the door to, which is we can now search beyond the limits of our PC. Now, this is kind of an infant technology, or an infant idea right now but it's growing very quickly and you can actually work with it. Now I'm just going to point you to some things and let you go out and read and just be aware of it, but this is based on something called Open Search and it's based on Open Search standards and the RSS format OK? Now you can go to opensearch.org and look at the documentation on this. Now what's required for this to work is somebody, some developer, has to build a connector, or a search connector that will connect your PC to whatever this remote repository of information is, okay, which means that from within your PC, from within Explorer, you can also have the search that when you're searching for a certain phrase on your laptop or your Desktop you can also, at the same time, reach out there and search Flickr, or Twitter, or Ebay, or any of those things OK? Now, there's already a number of these connectors out there and again you can build your own, so probably what we're going to start to see is, in the corporate world our own developers and our own administrators start to build these things to cause their searches to go all kinds of places. Now right now you can go out and look around and you can find some connectors for YouTube, Twitter, Google News, Amazon, Ebay, MSN search - there are a lot more of them out there - Deviant Art search and now this is a very promising looking feature that is just really starting to develop OK? Now the hot rumor out there right now is that we're going to see a software development kit get released on this, OK, that Microsoft's going to kind of really develop this idea and help their developers kind of get their head wrapped around this thing to build some more of these, but if you're a developer type, or if you're an administrator type who's into a lot of scripting and developing and stuff I would strongly encourage you to go out there and take a look at opensearch.org and look at some of the documentation and as this gets a little more formal and gets a little more structure to it, you're going to see some cool things that you can do that will let you search from your Explorer, from your Desktop there in Windows 7 not just the files on your machine but also the various pieces of data that are out there in repositories all over the Internet as well that you might want to search. So, anyway I just wanted you to understand that's what Federated Search is, that's where it's headed. Watch for this particular aspect of Windows 7 to explode and this is a good example of what Microsoft has had to do with this Operating System. We're no longer thinking in terms of the little box that our OS is running on, OK, we now have to think about OK, wait a minute, how do we connect this Operating System in a secure manner out to the rest of the world into the Internet because that really is the way we're living and using these things now. So Federated Search is one really good example of that, so go read up on it, just go to Google, just type in Windows 7 Federated Search and you'll find all kinds of things. You can download these connectors, load them in; just be careful with those things, keep in mind, a lot of places you're loading in things that have not been approved by Microsoft and so make sure you're backed up and all that before you download this stuff and play with it. So anyway, that's Federated Search on Windows 7.

Tutorial Information

Course: Microsoft Windows 7
Author: Mark Long
SKU: 34064
ISBN: 1-935320-86-6
Release Date: 2009-12-10
Duration: 7 hrs / 74 lessons
Work Files: Yes
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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