Last year I blogged about several free enterprise search solutions, and it looks Coveo is now bringing coffee to the free beer party I described back then. A couple of weeks ago the vendor announced "Expresso," "your free entry to enterprise search."

As always, "free" sounds too good to be true, as anyone who has reached the 25,000 document limit of the free version of Ultraseek (now owned by Autonomy) can attest ("Reached your 25K document limit? Call Sales at 1-888-3287-EEK!"). In the case of Expresso, the limits are much more hip to the times: 50 users, 1 million emails and attachments, and 100,000 documents. The product won't suddenly stop functioning at those limits, just nag you about it, and what's more, the licenses for more users or documents are in the thousands of dollars (not tens or hundreds of thousands, as with Ultraseek.)

Of course, I had to try this out. Coveo claims you can get Expresso up and running in under 45 minutes; and I must admit that the hardest part was to get a new Windows Server VM running on my Mac. The actual install, and a first index run of some documents on my own server was completed in about 15 minutes. Just enough time for me to brew a Moka. And after that, it performs exactly as I'm used to with Coveo: a straightforward search interface, which immediately, out-of-the-box, facets on document metadata (like document type, date, author).

Still too good to be true? Well, yes. If there's one qualm I have with Expresso, it's that it's relatively limited. It's easy to get going, sure, but so is the full Coveo solution. If you want a trial run before comitting to the full CES, you're better off requesting a download for that, instead of trying to extrapolate from Expresso. (Actually, I find the full Coveo product is easier to use than Expresso -- CES already is one of the most straightforward solutions to implement of all that we evaluate in our Search & Information Access Report, and if you need to, you can dig into all the detailed controls -- Expresso has hidden all that.)

Expresso really is Coveo Enterprise Search -- light. If this really were coffee, it'd be black, no sugar, hold the milk. It's good espresso, no doubt -- it indexes file shares, Exchange, and SharePoint, and even offers a mobile interface. So if you're a small-to-medium business that runs all things Microsoft, you should certainly give Expresso a go. However, it doesn't, currently, index websites or other mailservers (let alone other sources). If your intranet isn't on SharePoint, and your email isn't on Exchange, you're not going to get a lot of value out of the software. Free or not.