Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

166 Part III: Planning and Deployment
Planning Source Groups
As a starting point, you should define your source groups as follows:
■ Use one source group for each index. Doing this allows you to broadly define
search scopes for each portal site. For example, if your organization chose to
hold all its indexed content in a single content index, the source group
assigned to that index would allow you to easily define a search scope on all
content managed by that index.
■ Use one source group for each content source. Doing this allows you to more
narrowly define search scopes for each portal site. For example, defining a
separate content source for the corporate portal site and one for each divisional
portal site would allow you to easily define a search scope on the portal
site content that each source group crawls.
Note SharePoint Portal Server does not allow spaces in content index
names. Spaces are supported in source group names.
When you select the content source as SharePoint Portal Server Site
Directory, define the address of the portal site for the content source (for
example, http://sales/*), and then save definitions of content source
parameters, the address of the content source automatically changes—for
example, it changes to sps://sales/site$$$site/scope=*.
There is no way to directly crawl the virtual server of another team
site. If you want to have certain site collections indexed, you have two
options. The first is to add the site collection to another site directory manually.
The second option—which is less optimal—is to add a separate content
source for each site collection. The first option is the preferred and
recommended approach.
Planning Deltas Between Source Groups and Content Indexes
A best practice is to create a source group for each content index so that you’ll have
maximum flexibility in creating the search scopes. To use the example from the preceding
sections, you’d create a content source to each document group for each
team (chemicals, data modeling, and quality). You would assign each content source
to its own source group, such as Chemicals Source Group, Data Modeling Source
Group, and Quality Source Group. Then, for the research search scope, you’d select
all three source groups to offer portal site users the ability to search documents
across the research department.