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Better Search Helps Tame the MOSS-Ridden Beast

Search vendor Mondosoft announced the release of Ontolica Search version 3.1 for Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) 2007. While the 3.0 release, covered here in May, had people on the edge of their seats, the 3.1 version is less dramatic and yet no slouch — offering a number of helpful new features.

Mondosoft offers a number of Ontolica add-on modules for the SharePoint/MOSS 2007 product set. Ontolica Wildcard adds wildcard (*) search capabilities to MOSS. Ontolica Search gives you consistent search across MOSS 2007 and WSS sites. And Ontolica Reporting delivers a search analytics module for MOSS 2007. This provides administrators and business users with data regarding what information site users are looking for and what they’ve actually found.

New features of Ontolica Search v3.1 include:

• Improved Image Search: New search tab optimized for searching images.
• Improved Best Bets: Enables content authors to create editorial results on selected keywords and phrases. Ontolica offers the following improvements over standard MOSS Best Bets:
  • Support for showing an image in the result
  • Audience targeting
  • Site level Best Bets. Defining a Best Bet on a sub site will ensure that it is only shown when the user initiated the search from that sub site
• Additional Language Support: German, French, Italian and Danish
• Improved integration to My Sites: New Search Box feature, which can be enabled on the web application level to provide the Ontolica search box on all sites hosted by the web application.
• Load property values from web service: Enables developers to populate metadata drop-downs on the advanced search page from a custom web service.

Ontolica takes pride in toting its search tool as a product that increases search quality across MOSS and WSS. It is built atop the SharePoint search engine, so there’s no need to worry about installing extra servers, just extra bits into your existing install.

For the uninitiated, the company’s website offers helpful webcasts, including topics ranging from query handling to people searches, and a number of practical tutorials that address installation and configuration, which are dedicated to helping customers and administrators alike take full advantage of Its functionalities.

Feedback on the 3.1 release is still rather scarce, but based on the success of the 3.0 version, this newest release is looking like another pleasing update.

For those who like FREE stuff, Mondosoft has built a strategy with you in mind. The Ontolica Wildcard add-on is freely available. It provides limited, but very useful features for both SharePoint and WSS 2007 platforms. Download it here.

Are you currently a Mondosoft customer? Have you been playing with the Ontolica 3.0 or 3.1 versions? If so, we’d love to hear your feedback. Jump on down to the bottom of this page and let us know what you think.