Customize your search engine to fit your needs
Last month, I introduced you to Site Server 3.0 and described one of the software's most powerful features: the Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Publishing Solution (see "Publish Web Content with Site Server 3.0," November 1998). This month, I'll describe Site Server 3.0's other important feature, the Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Knowledge Management Solution, and show you how to build general catalogs and database catalogs for indexing and searching. (For an overview of Site Server, see Paula Sharick, "Site Server 2.0," June 1998.) The Knowledge Management Solution offers all the functionality of Microsoft's Index Server and a whole lot more.
I first wrote about Index Server 1.1, Microsoft's add-on indexing and search engine for Internet Information Server (IIS), in January 1997 (see "Microsoft's Index Server"). Since then, Microsoft has added Index Server 2.0 to IIS 4.0. In Site Server 3.0, Index Server takes another giant step forward. Whereas Index Server 2.0 indexed files on one computer, Site Server 3.0 indexes multiple Web sites, following various Web links. In addition, Site Server can index catalog content and search content from Web pages, Microsoft Office documents, text documents, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) databases, and Microsoft Exchange public folders; hand off the process of building catalogs to another server; and search across multiple catalogs with one query. Together, these features let you index more types of content than ever before and give you better control over the necessary resources for content indexing and searching.
Getting Started
Before you can index or search your Web content, you must build a catalog of your Web documents within the Knowledge Management Solution. A catalog contains information about each document (e.g., title and subject), a link to each document, and a full-text index of each document.
Building a general catalog. To create a catalog, open the Site Server Microsoft Management Console (MMC) plug-in, double-click Search, and double-click your Web server's name. You will see two folders, Catalog Build Server and Search Server, as Screen 1, page 184, shows. Catalog Build Server contains the information that Site Server 3.0 needs to build your catalogs. Search Server contains the completed catalogs ready for searching.
To start the catalog building process, right-click Catalog Build Server, and select New Catalog with a Wizard. Enter a name for the new catalog, and click Next. Then, decide what kind of crawl (Web link crawl, File crawl, or Exchange crawl) you want to perform. A crawl consists of going through the content files and indexing them. The next screen asks you to provide the directory you want Site Server to crawl. You can enter a fully qualified path (e.g., c:\server\directory), or you can enter a Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) name (e.g., \\servername\sharename). Unfortunately, you can't browse to the directory you want. Then, select the Search Host (i.e., the server or servers that you want to host the completed catalog). You can place the catalog on one or many servers. After you select the Search Host, click Start build now to build the catalog.
Site Server 3.0 will earn big points with many Web developers because the software typically lets you test your catalog as soon as Site Server finishes indexing. You can use the MMC to see whether the software is properly building your catalog and whether you're getting the results you expect. Double-click the Search Server folder, and double-click the name of the catalog you want to test. You might have to press F5 to refresh the screen. Select the Search page listed under your catalog name, and the MMC will display a Web page in the frame on the right. From this page, you can type any word or phrase you want to search on, and you'll see any documents the search returns.
Building a database catalog. Building a catalog to index databases is slightly different from building other types of catalogs. For starters, you use WebAdmin, Site Server 3.0's browser-based administration tool. Speaking from experience, I can tell you that building a database catalog never works on the first try. Every time I created this type of catalog, it timed out and failed on the first attempt but worked on subsequent attempts. I later found out that the default timeout value for building catalogs was too low.
To avoid this problem on complicated indexes that take a long time to catalog, you can go to the IIS folder in the MMC, right-click your Web server, and select Properties. Select the Home Directory tab, and click Configuration. Go to the App Options tab, where you'll see the ASP Script timeout field. You can increase this value to provide more time for the catalog to complete (e.g., increase the value to 300 seconds to allow 5 minutes). The downside to this fix is that IIS applies this timeout value to all your IIS scripts, and it can be long for a default length. Alternatively, you can go to \microsoftsiteserver\siteserver\admin\knowledge\search and open dbwiz6.asp. You then input
Server.ScriptTimeout = 300
in any of the <% %> tags. This setting tells the server to give your Site Server template 5 minutes before it times out.
To create an ODBC catalog, open the Site Server Search administration area at http://localhost/SiteServer/Admin/Knowledge/Search/default.asp. Start by defining the catalog. Click Catalog Build Definitions. Screen 2 shows all the available options. You can manage and create any general catalog from this page (note that you can create ODBC database catalogs only from this page).
Click Create, and select A database as the type of document you want to catalog. If you've already set up a data source, select it from the drop-down box of data sources available on the server. If you haven't set up your data source, you need to do so; otherwise, you can't connect to your database server. Select the data source you want to use, enter a new catalog name, and provide a username and password so that you'll have the proper permissions to access the table. If you have the proper permissions, the next screen lists all the tables that exist within your data source.
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