• Illustration: Tabbed Browsing in MSN Toolbar

MSN's free desktop search tool, which enables users to search their local drives, networked drives, and e-mail, will add tabbed browsing to Internet Explorer (IE), making Microsoft's browser more competitive with browsers such as Opera and Mozilla's Firefox. MSN also announced plans for a version of the Search Toolbar for corporate use. The announcements suggest that MSN has ambitions beyond its traditional consumer audience, but these ambitions overlap with other Microsoft product groups and could create confusion for corporate IT departments.

Toolbar Improves Desktop, Web Search

Formally launched in May 2005, the MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search is the successor to the MSN Toolbar Suite, which had been in a wide beta since Dec. 2004.

Like the earlier Suite, the Toolbar installs search panes and associated user interface elements in several places, including the Windows Taskbar, Windows Explorer, IE, and Outlook. From these panes, users can search the Web or search local and networked drives for e-mail messages, documents, and many other types of files. By default, each pane returns results of only appropriate types of data—for example, the Outlook toolbar is set to search only e-mail messages and attachments—but they can be configured to search other resources. All the search panes use the same data index and Internet search engine, and therefore return identical results for a particular resource.

The new Toolbar has several changes from its beta predecessor, including more user control over search functionality (for example, users can select any Web search engine rather than being forced to use MSN Search), a preview pane to view the contents of files from the search results interface, and improved indexing performance. A new Web site at addins.msn.com will provide downloadable add-ins with support for other file types, such as ZIP and Adobe's PDF—previously, ISVs were responsible for offering these add-ins on their own sites.

Tabbed Browsing Arrives Early

The next update to the Toolbar, expected in June 2005, will add tabbed browsing to IE. Specifically, it will let users open different Web pages as new tabs visible from a single pane, rather than as separate windows, letting users switch quickly between pages. It will also let users create a "routine," which automatically opens multiple Web pages as separate tabs in a single window. (For an illustration of this feature, see "Tabbed Browsing in MSN Toolbar".)

This planned feature suggests that MSN has become the ship vehicle for certain high-priority Windows features in the absence of interim OS releases. For instance, Microsoft said that better search would be a feature of Windows as far back as 2003, but Apple's OS X 10.4 (also known as "Tiger") was released with a similar feature in May 2005, more than a year before the next version of Windows (code-named Longhorn) is likely to ship. Similarly, the lack of tabbed browsing is one likely reason that IE's market share on Windows machines has slipped from 97% in June 2004 to 91% less than a year later (according to WebSideStory). But because the next version of IE is slated to incorporate many other changes, such as improved security and better support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), it won't be available until late 2005 at the earliest.

By making certain features available as free MSN downloads, Microsoft can respond quickly to competitors while continuing the more intensive development and testing work needed for new components of Windows.

Enterprise Desktop Search Tool Planned

MSN also announced plans to develop an enterprise search tool similar to the Toolbar, but one that is deployable via Systems Management Server (SMS) and extensible by enterprise developers to add support for custom file types. However, apart from these basic specifications, MSN has not revealed any details about its features, timing, or pricing.

Although the Toolbar is currently the most useful tool from Microsoft for end users to search local and networked drives, this announcement further fragments Microsoft's enterprise search strategy. Currently, the company recommends that enterprises use SharePoint Portal Server for indexed searches of networked resources, but it also offers search functionality in other server products, such as SQL Server (which companies can tailor to enable searches of unstructured data stored in SQL) and Exchange Server. Moreover, at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Apr. 2005, Microsoft demonstrated that Longhorn will have built-in desktop search functionality similar to that delivered by the Toolbar.

Before organizations standardize on any of these products, Microsoft will need to come up with clear scenarios for each one and ensure that they work together. At the very least, Microsoft will need to ensure that these tools share a common index, or that their indexes are synchronized with one another, or users will get different search results depending on which tool they're using.

Resources

Download the latest version of the Toolbar at desktop.msn.com.

The beta release of MSN's Desktop Search feature is covered in "MSN Launches Search Tools" on page 22 of the Jan. 2005 Update.

Microsoft's enterprise search strategy is covered in "SharePoint, SQL Server Anchor Enterprise Search" on page 3 of the Mar. 2005 Update.