Hiding in plain sight
Jon Udell talks today about how Windows has supported "desktop search" for ages, but kept these searching and indexing features well hidden.
I've had a similar experience. When I've been reading about how WinFS will allow XML metadata to be added to files, for better searching, I wonder am I the only person who remembers using the Microsoft Site Server "tag tool" to add XML metadata to files for better searching. Back in 1999, with a copy of the 1998 book "Microsoft Site Server Bible" in hand, I followed Microsoft's guidelines to "implement search in the enterprise" using Site Server 3.0 for a very large electronics manufacturer. This involved installing Site Server 3.0 (no easy task as it required a hefty amount of space in an LDAP directory), and then using a "tag tool" to tag files with XML metadata. What this did was to create new files, named the same as the original files except with ".xml" added to them, containing metadata. The flaw, of course, was that the metadata had to be entered. Also, there was no central store of meta-data. I could automate it, to some degree, by searching the files for content and then adding this to the meta-data.
And now, XML metadata for search in Windows is a "new thing".
The other interesting thing about that project was that i had to implement a lookup to an LDAP directory from inside a Web page, without requiring the page to be refreshed. I used a Java applet that called back to the server it came from. The user entered their name, and it was "automagically" converted to their full profile in the corporate LDAP directory (the same directory used by Site Server, actually). The Java applet called back to a script that returned the LDAP profile formatted as XML. At that time, we called this a "callback", not a "Web Service", as we would call it now. The idea for that little callback came from a Jon Udell column in Byte Magazine.
I wonder, how much new stuff is actually "new".
1:48:56 PM 
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