Looking to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 and using Windows 7 for your desktop operating system you really should look into the federated search capabilities provided by these products. Windows 7 provides the ability for someone to easily move between searching their desktop and SharePoint-based content, reducing the need to switch between windows (such as a Windows Explorer window and a web browser), which may disrupt their flow of work.
This is enabled by Microsoft’s use of the OpenSearch standard. Windows 7 (acting as an OpenSearch consumer) displays results returned by SharePoint 2010 (acting as an OpenSearch producer). It does this by:
- Receiving a typed search query from the desktop user.
- Reformatting this query into a URL using a predefined pattern, which results in the search query being passed to SharePoint.
- Fetching the page from this pattern-based URL via HTTP, which is serviced by SharePoint. The contents of this page are the SharePoint search results in OpenSearch XML format.
- Displaying these results within the Windows desktop environment.
Note: this will also work with other OpenSearch-compliant systems and is not limited to just SharePoint.