Improving Data Lookup with Indexing

By implementing WSS, you provide knowledge workers the capability to search through the entire Web site content on a particular virtual server. The searching capabilities of WSS have been improved from those offered with FrontPage 2002 and STS v1. In STS, searching was implemented through Internet Information Services (IIS) catalogs. This limited searches to documents on the file system. This limitation prevented users from being able to search the contents of lists or discussion board items. With the introduction of WSS, and its ability to leverage SQL Server 2000 for database information, the searching capabilities have been expanded to include all site content. Because all site content is contained in the database, it can be fully indexed for data lookup.

Understanding Searching in WSS

To make Web site searching available to knowledge workers through WSS, the back-end database implemented must be SQL Server 2000. Using the MSDE back-end does not provide this functionality. WSS uses the SQL Server 2000 full-text searching feature to search for Web site content.

The search engine on a Windows 2003 server can create a search index on a per virtual server basis. This means that search is either turned on or off for all top-level Web sites and subsites on a particular virtual server. Subsites inherit the search settings from parent sites. If search has not been enabled for a virtual server, the search links will not appear in the Web sites that reside on that virtual server.

Searching Features for Web Site

Another way to get searching features for Web site content is to implement SharePoint Portal Services 2003. In fact, SPS adds several search features not available to SQL Server 2000, including survey lists, attachments to list items, and Office 2003 file properties (such as "Author").

When full-text search is enabled in Windows SharePoint Services, a new empty catalog is created by default. Content is added to this catalog as it is added to the particular Web site. Aside from enabling and disabling full-text search, any search management or monitoring must be done from within SQL Server 2000 with the SQL Server administration tools.

When users search SharePoint sites by using SQL Server full-text searching, the search is performed by using a FREETEXT statement. Using FREETEXT allows searching by intentall terms are stemmed, so that the query looks for all inflectional forms of each query term . For example, if a user queries for "construct" , the query also returns results including "construction", " constructed " , "constructing" , and so on.

Although WSS with SQL Server 2000 is an appropriate solution to provide search capabilities to small and medium sized organizations, it is important to understand the limitations that this implementation might pose to large server farm type deployments. Search catalogs in SQL Server 2000 can use up to 40 percent of the hard disk space that data uses. Moreover, there is a hard limit of 256 search catalogs per server. There will be performance issues when a search catalog table reaches one million rows.

BEST PRACTICE: Offer Searching Functionality to Only a Limited Number of Sites

Consider offering searching functionality to only a limited number of sites when hosting Web sites based on Windows SharePoint Services inside a large organization. Choose those sites based on the appropriateness for search for its users and/or content.

Another item to keep in mind with SQL Server 2000 is that although it performs linguistic analysis on full-text search catalogs, it can only support one language per database. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, WSS can support multiple languages. So, if a large-scale WSS deployment is intended to support indexing across multiple languages this will require additional SQL Servers to support.

Enabling Indexing

Before knowledge workers can begin to search the Web site's contents, the searching function must be enabled. To enable search, you must install the full-text searching feature for SQL Server 2000, and then proceed to enable search in WSS.

Full-text searching is usually installed by default on SQL Server 2000, but if this has not been done initially, it can be added easily through the SQL Server Setup tools. To install full-text indexing on SQL Server 2000, perform the following steps:

1. Run the SQL Server 2000 Setup program.

2. On the setup screen, click SQL Server 2000 Components, and then click Install Database Server.

3. From the Welcome screen, click Next.

4. On the Computer Name screen, select the computer type, and then click Next.

5. When the Installation Selection panel is displayed, select Upgrade, Remove, or Add Components to an Existing Instance of SQL Server, and then click Next.

6. From the Instance Name panel, clear the Default check box, and then in the Instance Name box, select your SQL Server instance for Windows SharePoint Services and click Next.

7. Select Add Components to Your Existing Installation, and then click Next.

8. On the Select Components panel, in the Sub-Components list, select Full-Text Search as shown in Figure 26.4, and then click Next.

   Figure 26.4. Adding full-text search to SQL Server 2000.

   

9. Click Next again to begin the installation.

10. Click Finish.

After SQL Server 2000 has been configured to support full-text searching, you can enable search for Windows SharePoint Services. To enable searching for WSS, perform the following steps:

1. On the server computer running Windows SharePoint Services, click Start, point to All Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint Central Administration.

2. Under Component Configuration, click Configure Full-Text Search.

3. In the Search Settings section, select the Enable Full-Text Search and Indexing check box as shown in Figure 26.5.

   Figure 26.5. Enabling full-text search for a virtual server in WSS.

   

4. Click OK.