In my daily work I come across many customers that have implemented MOSS themselves and are having problems in one form or another. Some sites are better than others, but they all seem to have one thing in common. None of them have implemented "Search" in any form in their deployments. They all claim to have a number of reasons for this, but the most common one is lack of knowledge.
Although the "Search" aspect is a vast topic all by itself, I believe many people blow this out of proportion has they are all trying to build Utopia. Fortunately we do not live in Utopia, but in South Africa and therefore we can just implement the capabilities and it will most likely fulfil our needs as standard. I have therefore decided to write a simple blog about the basic steps required to implement "Search" in MOSS.
Before we start, let's take a look at the benefits of doing this. I always believe the "Why" is more important than the "How"!
- As Sharepoint grows and more and more content is added, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to find the information they need or even navigate their way through the structure. Search is an easy way of finding the information you need without knowing where it is.
- Sharepoint is becoming the focal point for Microsoft's Search strategy as more and more applications integrate with Sharepoint and store their information on this platform.
Now that we understand the Why! Let's take a look at the How!
The following is a basic list of steps that I am going to follow to configure search in MOSS. If WSS there is not much you can do with search. It is already configured on it's own content databases.
- Start the service - there is a separate service that comes with MOSS that enables searching.
- Create an SSP - this will allow you to configure the search settings.
- Configure the Search locations - this can be File servers, Web Sites, Sharepoint Sites, Mail Servers, Database servers, etc.
- Schedule the search service - this will determine how often the data is refreshed.
- Build a Search Centre - this is and enterprise Sharepoint template that we will use to test if the searching works.
Time to start with the first step.
Start the "Search" Service:
Even though the "Search" service is configured via the SSP, it still needs to be started as a service. This can be done by navigating to the "Operations" tab in the Sharepoint admin console and then selecting "Services on Server".
The corresponding screen will display a list of all services configured in the farm. Select the "Start" hyperlink next to the service called "Office Sharepoint Server Search". This action will then open the configuration screen for the "Search Service".
There are quite a number of options that can be configured for this service, so let's take a look at them.
- Query and Indexing - this allows you to dedicate a server for either searching or indexing if you have more than one SSP on a separate servers.
- Contact E-mail address - who to contact when things go wrong
- Farm Search Service Account - This is the account that will be used by default to index the crawl locations. This typically has to be a fairly high privileged account on the domain.
- Index Server File location - this is were the catalogue files will be stored for the indexed information. These files can get quite large and therefore it is not a good idea to leave this on the "C:" drive.
- Indexer Performance - the indexing component has the ability to run the CPU's at about a 100% if left unchecked. This is fine if you are indexing at night or on a different server, but if not, it becomes a good idea to throttle it a bit.
- Web Front End and Crawling - if you have more than one server installed with a SSP component in the farm, you can select which server is going to take the hit when the indexing services kicks in.
Create an SSP:
I am not going to explain how to setup an SSP in this blog as I have already written articles about it. They can be found by following the links below:
Installation Procedure for MOSS
Overview of Shared Service Providers in Sharepoint
Configure the Search locations:
The "Search" service can be configured in more detail by navigating to the "Search Settings" section in the SSP admin console. There does not seem to be much to configure by purely looking at the links available until you select the "Search Settings" link itself.
There are a huge amount of options available to configure on this screen, much more than I can possible write about in one blog. I am therefore only going to focus on the bare basics of getting search up and running and I will cover the other areas in future blogs.
The area that i want to focus on is called "Content sources and crawl schedules". This section will allow us to specify what needs to be indexed and then we can also specify when.
The Sharepoint sites are added as a "Content Source" by default. This is based on the logical assumption that you would always like to search on the content already added into your Sharepoint deployment. This would include all "Web Applications" , "Site Collections" , "Sites" and all the content therein. This content source will also be dynamically updated as you create new sites and site collections.
The real power of the "Sharepoint Enterprise Search" is the ability to go and index content lying external from Sharepoint and still use Sharepoint to go and find this information. This can be done by adding a "New Content Source" from the toolbar.
There are a number of options that can be defined on this screen. Let's take a look at them:
- Name: This is just a descriptive name used to uniquely identifying the source.
- Content Source Type: These are the locations where Sharepoint can go and crawl content
- Sharepoint Sites - other Sharepoint "Web Applications" that store their data in content databases
- Web Sites - other web sites that are not built on Sharepoint technology.
- File Shares - UNC path names to network servers and shares.
- Exchange Public Folders - used with the older versions of Exchange. The new version does not use public folders.
- Business Data - connections formed to external databases already connected via the BDC(Business Data Connector)
- Start Addresses: This depends on the content source type and can be anything from UNC path names to HTTP locations for web sites.
- Crawl Settings: this settings allows you to control the depth of the crawl. Sub folders and sub sites.
Here are some tips about defining source locations:
- Rather create multiple source locations than putting all the path's in one single location. It makes it easier for the index service and it is also easier to build search scopes later when they are split.
- Keep the depth of the crawl to a minimum. Only index what you need.
Schedule the Search Service for the crawl:
Using the "Manage Content Sources" page, you can select "Schedule" from the individual content sources drop down menu.
This will allow you to define a full and incremental crawl schedule:
- Full Crawl - this will populate or re-populate the entire search catalogue from the beginning. This can be very time consume and processor intensive.
- Incremental Crawl - this will only compare what has changed with what has been indexed and update the changes. This is typically scheduled on a regular basis.
Remember that the catalogue files location in defined during the creation of the SSP. Make sure they do not use the default and sit on the C: drive as they tend to consume a lot of disk space.
Build a Search Centre:
Now that the "Search Engine" has been defined so to speak. We need to configure the user front end so that searches can be performed by the end-users. This requires us to build a "Search Centre" using the standard enterprise templates provided by MOSS.
Once the "Search" centre has been define. Searches can be performed using the search box provided at the top of each Sharepoint site, or the user could navigate to the "Search Centre" itself if required.
The search results are then returned in a list with hyperlinks and a brief description of the content listed. Selecting the link will take you to the content desired.
This will then conclude the basic steps in setting up searching in MOSS.
Related Blogs:
Microsoft Search Strategy
Installation Procedure for MOSS
Overview of Shared Service Providers in Sharepoint