Windows SharePoint Services in a standalone environment that is without SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides full-text search capabilities for Windows SharePoint Services site collections using the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 full-text search engine. If the Microsoft SQL database engine is being used to store content instead of Microsoft SQL Server 2000, search is not available. Even with Microsoft SQL Server 2000, search is an option enabled or disabled when Windows SharePoint Services sites is installed. When it is enabled, an empty catalog is created and named "ix_databasename." The site content is then indexed by Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and as content is added to the site, the catalog is updated. After enabling SQL search, any management or monitoring of the catalog must be done using the Microsoft SQL Server administration tools. When search is enabled through SQL, a search text box appears on the Windows SharePoint Services sites. If search is disabled and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is installed, the site can still be crawled using SharePoint Portal Server 2003. However, the search box does not appear on Windows SharePoint Services sites. If both Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 searching are enabled for the site collection, the information is being crawled twiceonce by the SQL search engine and once by the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 index search engine. Using Microsoft SQL Server 2000 search is a good option for small to medium organizations that use Windows SharePoint Services, but it does not scale well to large server farms. Performance issues occur when there are more than a million rows in the search catalog table, and there is a limit of 256 search catalogs per server. In addition, search catalogs can use a significant amount of disk space, up to 40% of the space that the data uses. Microsoft SQL Server 2000 full-text searching supports only one language per database; therefore, it is also not the best option for supporting a multilingual environment. To enable searching of multiple languages, an option is to create a separate virtual server with its own database to host each language. The type of search performed using Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is "searching by intent." This means that when search text is entered, the search engine looks for all inflectional forms of each query term. For example, if the word "ride" is entered as the search text, the results would include items containing the word "ride," "rode," "riding," and "ridden." Features and Limitations of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Full-Text SearchingBecause site information for Windows SharePoint Services sites is stored in the SQL database, it can be indexed and searched. The SQL full-text search creates a catalog on the content database when the full-text search option is enabled. This means that lists, list items, and documents can be indexed, but there are some limitations with regard to these items. For example, list fields that do not contain text-based information such as number, currency, yes-no, and look-up cannot be searched. Document properties such as Author and Company also cannot be searched. If documents other than .doc, .ppt, .xls, .htm, and .txt are to be searched, special Microsoft SQL Server 2000 search filters need to be installed. Other items that cannot be searched using the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 search engine include list attachments, surveys, hidden lists, and external content such as file shares and websites that are outside the server farm. Additional limitations are placed on users when performing a search in Windows SharePoint Services. Boolean expressions such as And, Or, Not, and Near cannot be used. In addition, subsite content cannot be searched from top-level sites, and you cannot perform a search within search results to further limit the results. Enabling Windows SharePoint Services SearchTo enable searching within Windows SharePoint Services, the full-text searching feature for SQL Server 2000 must be installed on the SQL Server computer. This feature is typically installed by default. However, if it has not been installed, follow these steps to install full-text searching on the SQL Server computer: NOTE To configure full-text SQL searching, you must be a member of the Administrator's group on the SQL Server computer.
When SQL Server 2000 has been configured to support full-text searching, Windows SharePoint Services can be configured to enable search. To enable search in Windows SharePoint Services, follow these steps:
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 then creates the catalog and begins the index of the database. |