The recent platform update to WSS and MOSS has bought into play Search Server 2008. Whilst very powerful on it's own. it allows us now to provide roll up funcitonality inside WSS or MOSS.

Previously, roll ups were undertaken using Content Query Web Part, Third Party solutions like our friends at Bamboo or other custom components. For those who don't know what we mean by roll up, it is to take a central view on all content of certain type / property, e.g. all announcements from all webs in all site collections. The diagram below summarises...

Now I was going to type a long blog on how we did it using Search, but to save my fingers (or at least for the moment) take a look at DevCow

Of course, the beauty of the latest infrastructure update is that we now can roll up on the WSS platform.

Search is very powerful, not just for user defined results, but also for other tasks like that above. Hopefully, the next blog post will be a single persons profile, or displaying Business Data Catalog info

UPDATE - October

Something I forgot to mention when I posted the article was that using the normal Search Results web parts, there is a limit on how many items you can display at once without pagination