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You may not have heard about Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express, just as SQL Server Express is the little brother of SQL Server, Search Server 2008 Express is the little brother of MOSS. It offers most of the enterprise search capabilities of MOSS minus the BDC.

I’ve put together a screen cast of the install and initial setup of the product, you’ll find that the entire process is almost the same as WSS or MOSS, that is because the product is built from the same components. The one notable difference is the new Server Wizard page, it combines all the common settings such as app pool accounts, selection of the index server, content access accounts into one place.

The search administration is the same as MOSS with the infrastructure updates, in fact the infrastructure updates goal was to align the work done around the Enterprise Search Server space with the search capabilities of MOSS, new features like federated search etc.

I highly recommend taking a look at Search Server 2008 Express if you want to provide search to your organisation without the committing to a full MOSS install or even to increase the search capabilities of your WSS farm.

The install steps are:

• Launch the installer, make sure you select the ‘Install all components’  from the advanced option if you wish to connect to a SQL Server, otherwise the stand alone option if you wish to use the SQL Express version.
• The configuration wizard will run after the install (just like SharePoint), depending on your option, I choose to create a new farm.
• Enter your database server name and the database access account, this account should have permissions to create databases.
• Specify a port for central admin to run on, try to make this consistent across all your farms, it makes it easy to remember that way.
• Once the setup completes, central admin will be launched, a page specific to Search Server will be presented. This page will ask for the content access account, the application pool account and various other options. I really like this consolidated page, hopefully we will see more of it in SharePoint 14
• In my case the web application was created successfully, however the site collection wasn’t created, so I selected the create site collection option in central admin and used the search centre template.

The higher quality screen cast can be found here or the youtube version:

Of course you should also subscribe to the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog to help stay up to date with this product.