Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 22: Managing External Content in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 617
click Allow alerts on individual SharePoint list items, alerts for the list
will be sent if any item in the list is changed.
■ To crawl each SharePoint list item individually, click Index SharePoint
list items individually.
5. In the Specify Authentication section, do one of the following:
■ To use the default content access account, click Use default crawling
account to log in. If the default crawling account cannot access this
path, enter a user name and password combination that can crawl the
content source.
■ To prevent Basic authentication from being used, select the Prohibit the
server from passing plain text passwords check box. The server will
attempt to use NTLM authentication.
6. Finally, to use a client certificate for authentication, click Specify client certificate,
and then select a certificate from the list.
Working with Content Indexes
A content index is a full-text index of content stored on a SharePoint Portal Server
2003 portal site. These content indexes do not include the indexes from the
Microsoft SQL Server Full Text Index engine that can be used in each Windows
SharePoint Services site. The content indexes are populated by the Indexing Service
as it receives crawled content from the Gatherer Service.
Content indexes do not have a hard-coded limit. Successful testing has reached
5 million documents indexed to a single index file.
Creating a Content Index
The reasons for creating additional index files are a bit complex. You’ll need to bear
in mind a couple of competing issues when you decide to create a new index file.
First, bear in mind that if a user’s search spans multiple index files, this will
increase the load on your server when the query is executed and it will also take
more time to search each index file and then compile a single result set.
Second, ranking is performed within each index file but is not performed again
in the aggregate result set. So, if a search query pulls records from multiple index
files, there will be no overall ranking of the result set. Therefore, the best practice
here is to try, if you can, to limit the number of index files that you create. However,
if you find yourself creating a plethora of index files, group the content sources
together in such a manner so as to limit the number of times most search queries
will need to traverse multiple index files.
Third, if an index file should become corrupt (which can occur if your server
suddenly loses power or if there is a read/write failure in your hardware), bear in