New System Center Vista Sidebar Content Search Gadget

Wanted to bring to your attention a neat little bit of code that some colleagues in our user assistance/docs org have developed and released to the Live Gadget Gallery: a Web content search gadget for System Center.

This gadget offers the following features: Search all of System Center or scope by product; filter by domain, currently including:

• TechNet
• MSDN
• Microsoft.com /SystemCenter
• Downloads
• TechNet Edge Videos/Media
• Webcasts
• Blogs
• Forums
• Learning
• WWW (for everything else)

It also bears, if you're interested, the new branding that's getting implemented around and about MSCOM and in our various marketing materials, including on the new product sites. Simply install the gadget in your Vista sidebar, run a search and it will then display a results page which offers additional filtering options.

Our friends in UA are also putting together an HTML script for inclusion on blogs and Web sites, which can be customized with some knowledge of HTML. You can see a current version implemented as an experiment in the top of the masthead on this blog. Soon I hope to make that available to you for simple blog/site implementation, probably through a page we'll build on TechNet.

If you have suggestions or comments, and until I've got a better feedback channel for you, go ahead and speak up on the comments attached to this blog post.

IN the meantime, if you've got Vista, download the gadget and run search queries to your heart's content--and tell a friend if you think it's cool.

- dave//