Well, just days after announcing that SharePoint would no longer be bundled with Windows Server 2008, yesterday they further announced Microsoft Server Server 2008 and Search Server Express. These are the Enterprise Search service that up until now Microsoft has bundled within SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.
“Information workers waste as much as 9.5 hours each week on searches that don’t turn up the right information, which can add up to millions of dollars in lost productivity every year*,” … “We believe there is a core set of enterprise search features that every business should have, and we’re delivering them for free in Search Server 2008 Express.”
- Kirk Koenigsbauer, general manager of the SharePoint Business Group at Microsoft
Interesting, the key point thet Search Server 2008 Express is free. Ever try running Enterprise grade services on SQL Server Express ? (AKA MSDE) … you won’t get far… and MSFT will be more than happy to migrate you to SQL Enterprise 
At the Microsoft Unified Communications launch event in Montreal last week, it was mentioned that they were moving away from the monolithic server architecture and more towards smaller server applications that co-exist either on the same OS and/or physical box, or on multiple disparate boxes (virtual or physical) to provide for more granular management and availability.
And more granular server and CAL licensing… (and see how the folks at the GooglePlex in Palo Alto respond with regards to their Google Mini Enterprise Search in a Box product.
Time to redo all those Excel, err, Google Spreadsheets detailing the TCO of your IT software infrastructure.
P.S. Search Server Express 2008 is not yet RTM, but it the Release Candidate is available for free.
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