Yesterday we had a kickoff for an Early Adopter Windows 7 Community @ Microsoft in the Netherlands.
One of the presentations was about Federated Search and how this nice option will make our work much easier.

Some people were wondering howto deploy a Federated Search Connector in an Enterprise Environment, but nobody seems to know the answer. Reason for me to find out how to do this.

As for most solutions, it is not the only or the best solution, but because I like Group Policy Preferences (GPP) so much I developed a way to deploy a search connector using GPP.

In this example I will deploy the Youtube connector.
(Look for more connectors on : http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/742-windows-7-search-federation-providers.html)

On an admin PC just doubleclick on the downloade file, this will install the Search Connector on your PC, in fact it will install it in your user profile.

Now we need 2 files from your profile, first look up C:\USERS\<YOUR USERNAME>\LINKS\YOUTUBE.LNK
Before you copy this file right click it, choose properties and change the targetlocation to : C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Searches\Youtube.searchConnector-ms

Now copy this file to for example your NETLOGON share.

After that copy the file C:\USERS\<YOUR USERNAME>\SEARCHES\Youtube.searchConnector-ms to the NETLOGON share.

We’ve got the files that we need to deploy it to our users.

Logon to your domain controller (or the machine that you use to manage Group Policy) and open the Group Policy Management Console.
N.B. To manage Group Policy Preferences you need a Windows Server 2008 (R2), Windows Vista or Windows 7 machine.

Open your User policy and expand the User Configuration node.
Now go to Preferences -> Windows Settings -> Files.

Add these 2 files :

If you close the file screens, the preference screen will look like this (except for my domain name )

Now the only thing you have to do is wait until the user policy is refreshed ( a user does not have to take any action and will see the search provider automaticly)
And if you cant wait, just use the good old GPUPDATE.

Thats it for now, please enjoy.

Regards,

Erik