I did my first Search Server Express (SSE) 2010 installation the other day. I expected to see a new Service Application for search available, but what I did not expect to see were a few other services, in particular, the Secure Store Service.
Why do I care about this? Well, as I wrote about previously, the BCS relies on this very heavily when running in a multi server environment without Kerberos. (As an aside, Kerberos, or Cerberus is the three headed dog that guards the gates of Hades. Aptly named I think.). SharePoint Foundation 2010 does not come with this service, which pretty severely limits the value of BCS for these environments.
SSE is a free add-on to SharePoint Foundation 2010, and therefore, suddenly, there is hope! Foundation users CAN use BCS,they just need to install SSE first,and as a nice bonus, they’ll get a much stronger search engine.