Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 22: Managing External Content in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 611
Third, you’ll need to ensure that you create enough content sources to pull in
the information your users need to perform their jobs and collaborate effectively,
but not so many that you can’t manage them. Content source management can
become a real issue in information-intensive environments. Hardware resources can
be unnecessarily taxed, and without proper planning you can actually degrade the
performance of your indexing server when you try to crawl a content source.
For example, one procedure that occurs every night on nearly every server in
most environments is the backup procedure. There are others, such as antivirus
scanning and disk defragmenting. But for purposes of our conversation here, we’ll
focus on the backup procedure in our example. Because the crawling function is
highly processor- and RAM-intensive on both the crawling server and the content
source server, a best practice is to schedule your crawl schedules around the other
servers’ activities.
So, if you have 30 content sources that you want to crawl, a best practice is to
ascertain (as best you can) the regular routines that are run on that server and when
they are run, and then schedule the index update builds during times when that
server is not taxed by routines or client demand. Doing this can be a tall order, but
if those servers are in different time zones, having this information might widen the
crawling window for you. Therefore, you’ll need to think through what content
really needs to be crawled and indexed versus how many content sources you’ll
have, when the sources can be crawled, and how you’ll do this without creating bottlenecks
on either server during peak crawling periods.
Default Content Sources
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 installs with several default content sources, as follows:
■ Portal Site Content (This Portal). An incremental update of portal site content
is conducted every 10 minutes in the background, and an incremental
(inclusive) update is performed each night. Portal site content includes content
hosted in areas plus linked content via portal listings.
■ People Content (People). An incremental update of people content occurs
every 60 minutes in the background. This content source crawls people profiles
and personal sites and includes both public and private documents. However,
remember that permissions are applied to result sets before they are
presented to the user so that the user will see only documents for which the
user has permissions.
■ Non–Portal Site Content (Site Directory). An incremental update of non–
portal site content is conducted every night to ensure that all non–portal site
content is included in the index. Non–portal site content includes all site collections
created in the Sites Directory, but it can include other content sources
as configured by the portal administrator or administrators.