Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Planning Alerts
Chapter 8: Planning Your Information Structure 169
Incremental (Inclusive)
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 introduces another type of update known as the incremental
(inclusive) update. This update is similar to the incremental update except
that it includes deleted content. The incremental (inclusive) update also detects
deleted entries in the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services document libraries and
lists. The incremental update detects modified or new documents and list items only.
The incremental update is the least expensive update if it is used with Windows
SharePoint Services sites. The incremental (inclusive) update is more resource
intensive than the regular incremental update and should therefore be run less often
if performance is a top priority for you.
Adaptive Update
An adaptive update, like the incremental update, crawls only the content that, statistically
speaking, is most likely to have changed since the last adaptive update.
Because adaptive updates are likely to miss at least some content changes, these
updates will crawl all the content in a content source every two weeks.
Unlike the incremental update, the adaptive update increases its efficiency
every time it is run based on a statistical analysis of the historical information on what
content has and has not changed. The time required for an adaptive update varies
and is based on the different types of content sources and the protocol handler.
The recommended approach is to run adaptive updates daily for large source
groups and more often for smaller source groups. Avoid running full updates whenever
possible. However, how you choose to configure your index updates is dependent
on your search requirements. If your organization is search intensive and
requires immediate updates to the search indexes as new content is added or
removed, you might need to schedule updates to occur more frequently. You must
balance the search requirements with the time it takes to perform an update and
propagate content indexes.
There is also a scheduling factor to consider too. Updates are both processor
and RAM intensive. You’ll want to ensure that you’re scheduling your updates to
occur when your servers running SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint
Services are not being backed up, scanned for viruses, or performing any other routine
that consumes large processor resources, RAM resources, or both. In addition,
you shouldn’t crawl content sources during their nightly routines either. Therefore,
a best practice is to create a schedule matrix and schedule the crawling of content
sources when those sources are being used the least.
Alerts provide notification when information of interest is added or updated on the
portal site and associated content sources. You can define areas of interest and identify
how and when you want to be notified. You can add an alert to track new