Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

Configuring and Maintaining the Search and Indexing Components

Configuring search and indexing correctly is important so that users receive accurate, relevant, and expected results. Configuring search for your organization involves three primary steps:

• Indexing content: All the content that you want to make available to users must be defined as content sources and indexed on a regular basis so that the results are available to be returned in searches. Content sources are defined and indexing is scheduled and completed by the Shared Service Provider (SSP).
• Associating Web applications with content indexes: Each Web application needs to have an associated SSP that provides the indexes for searching.
• Define scopes: Search scopes allow users to target the slice of content they want to search. If configured appropriately, users should be able to pick a scope for their search that returns a reasonable number of relevant results.

Indexing content

Choosing what content to index and configuring your indexing settings is the primary task for indexing content. MOSS can index content from several types of content sources, including these sources for which SharePoint has provided out-of-the-box support:

• File share content: SharePoint can index content that is placed on file shares.

• Exchange server content: Exchange public folders content is a good potential source for indexing corporate knowledge.

• Lotus Notes servers: If your organization uses Lotus Notes, SharePoint can index the Lotus Notes ...