In the middle of all the excitement of the APAC SharePoint Conference, Breakfast Briefings, Partner Conference Prep and product releases, it was announced in June that we at MacroView have won the Quickstart for Microsoft Search Innovative Solution Contest!! This contest was open at all Partners who signed up to the Quickstart for Search program and had Innovative Search solutions developed for the Portal Server or MOSS environments.

Way back in February I posted about some work I had been doing around a customized search UI. This was based on a generic, customizable Web Part for rendering user friendly and consistant UI for the user when they search using MOSS. This customizable Search solution is what we submitted as our entry.

Congratulations also to the other Australian Partners (OBS and Unique World) who made the 13 Finalists. It says a lot about the quality of Partner - and competition  - in Australia that there was such a representation from down under amongst some major players from around the world!

I'm pretty excited about our win, and also about the awesome customization features within MOSS and the Search area in particular. If you're deploying MOSS and looking for ways to improve the OOB Search feel free to drop me a line, or even better, if you are going to the Worldwide Partner Conference look me up in WPC Connect!