Google desktop has had a chequered reception - security problems, indexing central mail/file servers. The users love it though, mainly because their PC's are full of important information that's crucial to their job, and Google allows them to navigate through their lack of organisation.

 

At Signals, users PC's aren't backed up, and we assume they might have a disk crash or the machines stolen during the night. All critical data is kept on the servers, so it worries me that people here see any benefit from installing Google Desktop, since 'benefit' means it's either indexing our server filesystems, or confirming the existence of non backed-up 'useful stuff'

 

The silver lining - We have an archive server that contains the last 10 years worth of Signals jobs. That totals around 900GB of data, and we refer back to this content on a day to day basis. After a few half hearted attempts at using windows indexing technology, and a bespoke attempt, we decided to give GD a try.  With the standard install, plus a widely available plugin to make it run as an externally accessible web server, and some hacking of the resource DLLs, we've created our own mini version of google, and it works brilliantly - indexing inside PDF's email PST's, and most other file types.  All presented in an interface that everyone's familiar with.

 

 

Gary