Since the Research task pane is built into Microsoft® Office 2003, it does not require any customization. From a network perspective, all communications take place over HTTP (using XML, or, more specifically, SOAP), so no special firewall configuration is required. Research services can be hosted internally or externally.
The following sections describe the architecture from the perspective of IT professionals concerned with how the Research task pane functionality fits within their existing IT infrastructure.
Client/provider communications
Research services are made available through a provider, which can host multiple services from a single URL. A provider corresponds to a single XML Web service or pair of Web services. Microsoft Office 2003 applications connect to a provider through its URL and receive from the provider a list of available services. By default, all Office 2003 clients are configured to check Microsoft's discovery service (http://office.microsoft.com/research/query.asmx) for new Microsoft services and for third-party services that Microsoft lists. Organizations can also create their own providers, exposing whatever services they choose, and use their discovery servers to make those services available to users.
All client/provider communications, as well as client/service communications, take place over HTTP. Therefore, as far as clients are concerned, it makes no difference whether the provider or service is located within the firewall or on the Internet (Figure 1). Research services can be configured and accessed on an intranet, through the Internet, or locally on a client computer. (Running a service on the local computer has limitations that are discussed in Building A Local Service.)
Figure 1. Possible client/provider locations
Every research service available on a client computer is defined by a group of registry settings. Therefore, installing or deploying a research service involves adding those registry settings on the client computer. There are several ways to accomplish this. For more information, see Deployment Overview.
The sequence of events for manual installation of a new service by a user is as follows:
For smart tag integration, the service provider incorporates a separate setup process from within a search result in the Research task pane. For more information, see Adding Actions to Query Results.
Note IT professionals can and should incorporate research service installation into their deployment strategy for the company. For more information, see Deploying Services to Office Users.
Once a service is registered, users can initiate searches against that service. During a search, the Office 2003 application sends a query packet to the service, which replies with a response packet containing search results. All communication takes place with formatted XML packets, and each segment of the communication conforms to a set of schemas. Figure 2 shows the order of the XML schema packets that pass between client and service.
When the Office 2003 application receives a response from a service with the results of the search, it displays the results in the Research task pane.
Figure 2. Client/service communications
Office 2003 includes a rich offering of research services out of the box, consisting of a number of Microsoft services, as well as third-party services provided by Microsoft partners. Figure 3 shows the Research Options dialog box, which displays installed services and allows users to activate and deactivate services.
Figure 3. Installed research services
The following services are installed by default:
The Thesaurus and Translation services, listed in the Research Options dialog box in the Reference Books section, are locally installed. This ensures that offline searches yield results for these references. All other default services are not locally installed, so offline searches do not yield results.
Note The availability of built-in research services varies according to the edition of Microsoft Office 2003 and the product.