This is the second article within the six-part series on MOSS Search capabilities and its customization. This article builds upon the introduction article (http://sharepointmagazine.net/technical/customisation/customizing-search-series-introduction) and will dive a little deeper into the settings and configurations.

Search Service Settings

As explained in the introduction, the server that runs the search service needs to have the Office SharePoint Server Search service started and configured. This is facilitated from Central Administration (CA). From within CA, under Operations, click on Services on server:

This will bring up the Services on Server page. At the bottom of the Services on Server page, the services that are Stopped and Started are shown:

The Office SharePoint Server Search service needs to be started if it is stopped. This can be facilitated by clicking the Start link under the Action column:

Clicking on Start (or on the service name if it is already started) will bring up the configuration page for the search service:

For the scenarios presented in this series, the server will be used for both Indexing and Querying so both checkboxes at the top of the configuration screen will be checked. The contact email address should contain a support address that can be used if there are search-related issues (this is typically used when searching outside of the domain so people can yell at you for crawling their servers and slowing them down). The farm service account should be entered accordingly in the next section of the configuration.

The farm search service account should be a separate domain account that has (or will have) read access to all content that will be crawled by the search service; anything that the service account cannot access will not be indexed and therefore will not appear in any search results.

The index performance determines essentially determines how hard the indexer will work. The crawl process does put strain on the SQL Server that stores the content. The description on the screen somewhat explains this, however, the selection here may depend on the full and incremental crawl schedules (the schedules will be shown in the next section). The default setting is partly reduced so that setting is fine for this series. Once again, the setting here could affect overall performance; this is regardless of which web-front-end it uses to crawl.

Which brings us to the next setting in which all web-front-ends can be used to crawl or a dedicated server may be selected. The selection here depends on how many web-front-ends are in the farm and/or which servers are in a load-balance cluster along with, once again, the crawl schedules.

Search Settings

Once the service has been started on one of the servers in the farm, the next step is determining what will be crawled and how often. Of course, there are out-of-the-box default settings which will be shown here. The remainder of this article series will build upon the default configuration and expand the overall search experience within MOSS.

The search settings are governed by the Shared Services Administration within the SSP that was setup during the MOSS installation process. Clicking on the SSP name will bring up the overall settings.

Clicking on Search settings will show the main search settings screen in which most of the modifications within this series will occur.

Content Sources

The content sources can be seen by clicking on the “Content source and crawl schedules” link from the Search Settings screen:

The screen that follows is the Manage Content Sources page. The out-of-the-box implementation automatically has the “Local Office SharePoint Service sites” content source which defaults to the top-level site collection.

In this series we will add a new content source such that business data can be included within the search environment.

Scopes

Towards the bottom of the Search Settings page lives the Scopes section. Scopes are “views” into the crawled content that can be used to define the boundaries of a user search query (hence the name “scope”).  Clicking on the “View scopes” link will show the View Scopes page.

We will create a new scope for our business data named Clients within this series.

Metadata Properties

The Metadata property mappings link will bring up the Metadata Properties page. From that page, new managed properties can be generated. This will enable us to essential map column names to crawled content such that the search results may be customized.

In this series we will create new managed properties and map them to our BDC crawled content. We will then use those “columns” within the rendering of the search results.

What’s Next?

In the next article, we will add a new content source and scope to the search settings. The content source will be based on a BDC application (i.e. Business Data). THE TRUE CUSTOMIZATION STARTS NEXT SEGMENT - STAY TUNED!