Author: John R. Durant
This article discusses:
- Using Research Services to search IMs
- Storing and indexing IMs
- The Research Services Development Extras extensions
- Fast, easy Research Service development with Visual Studio
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Read article in MSDN magazine
Did you know that you can build your custom web services that will integrate into the Research Pane of Office (2003 or above) and IE?
What are research services?
Research Library Extensibility
Common to all applications in the Microsoft Office System, a new task pane called the Research Library enables user-initiated searches across local and remote data sources, both behind a corporate firewall and on the Internet, and may include sites based on Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies as well. Its primary offering starts with basic resources such as Thesaurus and Dictionary in multiple languages, bilingual dictionaries, computer translation, encyclopedia, and Web searching.
The research library, which can be controlled by administrators at a corporate level, can be extended by developers and third-party information providers to make business-specific data available to users. The research library's task pane can be customized to house smart tags, hyperlinks and textual data, which also can be inserted into Office applications as structured XML data, which isn't the case with typical Web searches. One interesting note about research library extensibility is that, unlike many customization scenarios in Office, which are typically delivered at the document or application level, extending the research library allows developers to provide an intelligence solution that permeates across the Microsoft Office System.
You can find a introduction here or just look at the sample research services "Hello World" and the research service for the Google web service.
What do I need to get started?
To develop custom research services you need at least the .NET Framework 1.0 SDK respectively Visual Studio .NET 2002, Office 2003 and IIS 5.0.
Start out by downloading the SDK from here and the recently published Development Extras - that I strongly recommends since they make development a lot easier (as described in this tutorial).
Enhance your research service with graphics and fancy fonts, set custom time-out values, combine the power of your service with Office SmartTags and/or develop research services that work offline - without internet or (W)LAN access.
Who uses them anyway?
Just to name a few of them:
Where Do I get more information?
Take a look at Research Services on Office Developer Center or on my frequently updated website at www.dotnet-online.com/researchservices/.