VizitSP uses SharePoint Solution Installer, so does Microsoft
While looking into SharePoint Search Server 2008 Express and ways we can customize the search results for our customers a coworker suggested I look at Faceted Search, an Open Sourced project originally an add-on for SharePoint that’s written by Microsoft. It was mentioned on CNet last year, hosted by CodePlex and uses the SharePoint Solution Installer to aid installation of the solution file into your SharePoint farm.
It’s interesting to note that they chose to use the SharePoint Solution installer, as we did, to make solution installation easier on our customers. Ours is only slightly modified to include the solution file in the EXE and to not use an external configuration file, but it’s a long cry from using stsadm for solution installation which is what Microsoft leaves you with by default! stsadm is great in its own right, the extensibility is great, and there are a ton of add-ons.
In Matt Asay’s article about Microsoft open sourcing Faceted Search, he says, “It's not clear how anyone could use this open-source code beyond Sharepoint, thereby limiting its utility, but I still think it's a step in the right direction for Microsoft.” I think it’s clear how people could use this! For starters, Matt mentions tweaking, which I agree with, but also my biggest use it to learn from it. Microsoft is the expert in SharePoint and SharePoint Search, after all, so I know I’ll be dissecting and learning from the source code for a little while. I view it as a complete example of how to build webparts for SharePoint as a sort of extension to all the MSDN documentation you can read. How can you use it beyond SharePoint? Directly, there is no way. Indirectly, I think Microsoft is trying to show how search should be. I like sites like Newegg for their search. The ability to drill down on products is a good thing, but I think Microsoft is trying to show that all of that searching, all of the drilling, can be cut shorter by showing you all of the facets of your search in one shot. It can be information overload, but customized properly it should allow you to get at the information you want faster.