Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 8: Planning Your Information Structure 165
site or sites. If you’re planning to have multiple portal sites, you should also plan to
propagate your scopes across all your portal sites unless you have a specific reason
for not doing this.
Note If you want to see changes to a search-scope definition immediately,
you must reset Internet Information Services (IIS) by using the IISRESET
command. This should be done only during the setup process and not when
the system is live in production.
Planning Content Sources
When operating a corporate portal site with multiple divisional portal sites, you
should, at a minimum, configure content sources as follows:
■ One content source for the corporate portal site.
■ One content source for each divisional portal site.
■ One content source for the people in your organization. This content source is
set up by default. It returns matches based on entries in the profile database as
well as content from a user’s personal site.
■ One content source for each divisional Windows SharePoint Services virtual
server in your organization.
You’ll also need to remember the old adage “garbage in, garbage out.” The
tighter and more defined your content sources are, the leaner and more meaningful
the data in the result set will be. For example, if you need to crawl five documents
on a given website that hosts 200 documents, it would not be a best practice to
crawl the entire website. Your index would end up with 195 unneeded documents.
In a situation like this, you might consider creating one content source to crawl all
five documents or even five content sources, one for each document, depending on
their location in the directory structure and if they are shared via the same share or
different shares.
The point here is to remember that what you crawl gets placed in your index
and you should crawl only information that is required to be in your index. This gets
back to our earlier discussion about where your information is and what it consists
of. Knowing this will help you build a tight list of content sources that will, in turn,
give you a tight index that will return highly meaningful results to your users when
they issue a query in the Search Web Part. Good planning is paramount to a successful
deployment.