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Ontolica Wildcard does not allow property based searches

We recently deployed Ontolica into a MOSS environment that already had a heavily customised MOSS search configuration. The environment makes heavy use of property based searches in the form of [managedproperty]:[searchterm].

After creating a new search centre and replicating all our existing search functionality in the Ontolica web parts we ran into a problem.

When using the property search syntax in Ontolica we get no results with the message "Searching the property [managedproperty] is not supported in the Wildcard edition of Ontolica".

Looking at the product matrix ( http://www.ontolica.com/upload/pdf/factsheets/OntolicaSearch2007_Matrix.pdf) we should be able to retain all existing features of standard MOSS 2007. This does not seem to be the case.

Using Ontolica Wildcard actually REMOVES standard MOSS search functionality.

I think Ontolica wildcard is a great product and its fantastic that they have made this component completely free. At a loss here as it basically removes 95% of the situations where we would employ the product.

I sent an email to the support team and they confirmed that this was the case:

"The wildcard license does generally not support the displaying of custom properties in search results"

2 comments for “Ontolica Wildcard does not allow property based searches”

  1. Lars Fastrup  8/15/2007

    Zac - First of all thanks for your interest in our product. I am pleased to hear you in general like it. It is true that you can work with custom properties OOB in MOSS 2007 but not in the Ontolica Wildcard edition. The Wildcard edition supports the managed properties available OOB in MOSS 2007 but not your custom ones. A large part of the Ontolica features are centered around custom properties and we therefore had to introduce this limit as we would otherwise give almost everything away for free. The free Wildcard edition was designed for situations where you just need basic search + Wildcard search. We do not believe this to be unreasonable as you really get a lot of value by purchasing the commercial Ontolica license. I can recommend to take a look at our videos here to study what you all get: http://www.ontolica.com/Services.aspx Our license policy is also very fair - you only pay a server license for each frontend web server in your farm. I am sure you will agree that Ontolica deliver more value at a lower low cost compared to developing your own custom search solution. You will, besides getting a high quality and feature rich product, also get support and free upgrades for 12 months. You might additionally benefit from our know-how around SharePoint search when raising support issues. We now have four years of experience working with SharePoint search as we started developing the first version of Ontolica for SharePoint back in the summer of 2003. Cheers Lars Fastrup, Ontolica Product Manager

  2. Josh Noble  8/15/2007

    Zac, With the release of Ontolica version 5x last month, the ability to perform wildcard searches on custom properties was unlocked for the Wildcard version of Ontolica. If anyone visiting this post would like to investigate any version of the Ontolica Search enhancement, please feel free to contact me directly at jno@surfray.com. Josh Noble

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