Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 22: Managing External Content in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 621
Deleting a content index also deletes the indexes on the search servers in a
server farm configuration.
Managing and Editing Search Scopes and Source
Groups
Search scopes give users the opportunity to search a portion of the overall index,
thereby placing less demand on the server and returning a sharper, more focused result
set. Search scopes can be defined by topics and areas, by source groups, or by both.
Source groups are a new feature of SharePoint Portal Server 2003. (They are
not supported in Windows SharePoint Services.) Source groups enable an administrator
to group together unique combinations of content sources and index files so
that they can be used in one or more search scopes. The advantage of using source
groups lies in their granularity: by creating a 1-to-1 relationship between content
sources and source groups, you can build search scopes that allow users to search
multiple layers of granularity in their result sets.
For example, let’s suppose that you have three Windows SharePoint Services
sites in the research department: Data Modeling, Chemicals, and Team Discussions.
Each site has a distinct purpose, and you need to index the information in these sites
so that your users can search it. Now, let’s further suppose that your users sometimes
need to search just the Chemicals documents and at other times they need to
search across all three teams in the research department. Through the smart use of
source groups and content sources, you can accommodate both types of searches.
What you would do is create a content source to each site—one for Data Modeling,
another for Chemicals, and a third for Team Discussions. In the properties of
the content source (keeping in mind that you must have Advanced Search Administration
Mode enabled), you would type in a unique source group name for each
content source, such as Research Data Modeling Source Group, Research Chemicals
Source Group, and Research Team Discussions Source Group.
Then you would create three search scopes—each one based on a source
group. Therefore, you would create a Research Data Modeling Search Scope, a
Research Chemicals Search Scope, and a Research Team Discussions Search Scope.
Finally, you would create a search scope that encompasses all three source groups,
named (perhaps) Research Department Search Scope.
In this scenario, if a user wanted to find documents related to plastics in the
Chemicals site, the user could select the Research Chemicals Search Scope and execute
her query against that individual index from the Chemicals Content Source.
However, if the user wanted to search across all three sites for documents related to
plastics, she would select the Research Department Search Scope and her search
would be executed against the portion of the overall index that was built from all
three of those content sources.
Implementing a robust search scope hierarchy is no easy task, and it is really
more art than science. One suggestion to capture and build a hierarchy that your