My first impression was that the Vista developers had left Vista in a crippled state, unable to index shared network folders, but apparently they were just running late. Today Microsoft released a Vista-compatible add-in for Windows Desktop Search for indexing mapped network drives and UNC paths. Here’s the Knowledge Base article about the update, and here’s the download page.
Searching in Vista is now equivalent to searching in Windows XP with WDS – the underlying technology is identical.
My blood pressure is down. It’s still difficult to evaluate whether the changes in Vista are important for small businesses or if they’re cosmetic (and I’ll have much more to say about that in the next few months), but at least Vista isn’t a non-starter.
