SharePoint crawling files in a file server

Question

Is SharePoint capable of crawling files that are store in a file server? If yes, how?

Answer 1

You'll need to add a search source, scope and display group in Central Admin. See the following for details:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA011603241033.aspx http://sharepointsearch.com/cs/blogs/sanjaya/archive/2009/04/03/sharepoint-search-scopes.aspx

The second link actually has a pretty good walk through.

Answer 2

You only need to add a content source to your SSP.

1. Go to the Central Administration site, click the SSP link
2. Navigate to Seach Administraction
3. Click content sources
4. Select "New Content Source"
5. Choose a "Content Source Type" of File Share

Unfortunately, the ease of adding a new content source belies the thinking that should be done before taking this action. Secifically, you need to choose an indexing account that has access to the documents.

You also need to make sure the index has sufficient space to index the contents of the drive (plan for ~30% of document space for the index)

Another tricky issue is hiding stuff you don't want to see. I have heard some vastly humerous stories of poeple typing in "credit card details", "password" or "salaries" into the search after point at large shared drives and being rather horrified with the results.

Be sure you are familiar with search scope in order to get the most from your search, but it is not necessary for adding the new content source.