Chapter 25 -- Crawling Custom Metadata

Chapter 25

This chapter provides the steps necessary to promote metadata from externally crawled content into Microsoft^® SharePoint^™ Portal Server 2001 content indexes. This chapter also includes a utility script that allows you to automate the process by editing an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file and running a script.

The need to include custom metadata embedded in documents in an index is particularly important to organizations attempting to include content currently crawled by Microsoft Site Server in an index.

SharePoint Portal Server crawls content sources such as file shares and Web sites. In the process, SharePoint Portal Server gathers full-text information from documents and includes it in the index. However, the ability to map metadata to properties of SharePoint Portal Server is restricted to the contents of Lotus Notes databases.

You can map metadata from file share and Web site content sources to properties of SharePoint Portal Server. However, no user interface exists for this mapping. You can write custom code to perform this mapping.

Properties for HTML files are usually stored in <META> tags. Properties for Microsoft Office documents are usually stored in OLE structured storage. You can view most Office properties from within the Office application by clicking Properties on the File menu.

This chapter assumes that the reader is familiar with SharePoint Portal Server, has read the documentation relevant to searching and creating indexes, and, ideally, has previously configured SharePoint Portal Server to crawl a content source.

This chapter refers to two .zip files containing custom code: C25615624Propmap.zip and C25615624Htmlprop.zip. You can access these .zip files in the \Docs\Samples\ directory on the SharePoint Portal Server Resource Kit CD.

The custom code provided is not supported. There is no guarantee that the object model used will be supported in future versions of SharePoint Portal Server.

SharePoint Portal Server supports mapping properties only for Lotus Notes content sources and only by using the user interface provided in SharePoint Portal Server.