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Just Bing It

Thursday, June 4, 2009

You know you've got a winner when your name becomes a verb. How many times have you heard, "Just Google it." Well, that parlance is about to change.

Bing, Microsoft's new search portal, debuted this week to rave reviews. Bing is different than other search engines because of what Microsoft calls Bing's Decision Engine. It gives much more useful and relevant information than competitors, without having to enter arcane search terms. Take a look at this example to see a side-by-side comparison of Bing and Google search results.

I especially love the travel results that Bing offers. Microsoft has merged several technologies together to give easy to consume results with truly meaningful information. For example, a search for airline flights on Bing not only returns the best flights, but predicts whether prices are going up or going down, similar to FareCast.

You can also check flight times simply by entering the airline and flight number in the search window, such as "United 9120" or simply "ua 9120".

The image and video results are very cool, too. Image search results are returned on a single scrollable page rather than dozens of pages you have to click through. Video search results actually play in the results window by simply hovering your mouse over the video.

I'd like to find a way to create a custom portal page that allows me to dashboard the information I'm interested in, such as news, market reports and RSS feeds. I'm still learning all the cool things Bing does, but so far I'm very impressed. I recommend you Bing it to find out for yourself.

Bing. It's not your father's search page.

Create a Saved Query that Displays Group Members

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Saved Queries in Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) allow you to create simple or advanced LDAP queries against the Active Directory that can be saved, reused and edited. Examples might be a query displaying all locked out users in the domain or all the users who have a mailbox on a particular Exchange server and have the word "Manager" in their title.

A client I worked with needed a query that displayed all the members of a certain (large) group. This would allow him to select all the users at once and move their mailboxes to another server.

Try as he might, he couldn't get the query to display the group's members. It turns out this is because the group name must be entered using its distiguished name. Here's how to do it:

Use ADSIEdit.msc (in the Windows Support Tools) and navigate to the group

View the properties of the group to reveal the distinguishedName attribute value and copy it to the clipboard (shown above)

Open ADUC, right-click Saved Queries and select New query

Enter a name for your query, "Accounting Group Members"

Click the Define Query button

Select Users, Contacts, and Groups from the Find: dropdown list

Click the Advanced tab

Click Field > User > Member of

With the condition of "is (exactly)", paste the group's distinguishedName into the Value field and click Add

Click OK twice to complete the query

Search results may take a long time to appear because Microsoft Search is unavailable

Friday, September 7, 2007

A colleague of mine ran into a problem during an Exchange 2003 / migration. When some of the users tried to search their mailboxes, they receive a message saying, "Search results may take a long time to appear because Microsoft Search is unavailable. Results will not include matches in the e-mail body." (See the example above, from OWA)

This will happen to all mailboxes on the same server if the Microsoft Exchange Search Indexer service is stopped, but in this case only some of the mailboxes on the same server were affected.

I tested the same thing on my home server and found the same results. I had migrated all my accounts from my Exchange 2003 server months ago. When I ran the Get-Mailbox Test-ExchangeSearch PowerShell command I found that all my mailboxes except one (a service account) came back as True (enabled).

The bad news is that there's no way to enable Exchange Search for an individual mailbox. However, the following PowerShell command worked for me to correct the problem:

ResetSearchIndex -Force -All

This command will stop the MSExchangeSearch service, remove the entire search database and restart the MSExchangeSearch service. The MSExchangeSearch will immediately begin crawling the database(s) and rebuild the index(s). It took about 3 minutes on my 550MB database in a VM. You can use Perfmon to watch the Full Crawl Mode Status counter in the MSExchange Search Indices performance object to monitor when it's done. The counter value will be 1 while it's rebuilding, 0 when it's done.

Usage for the ResetSearchIndex PowerShell command: