Microsoft Content Management Server : Searching MCMS with SharePoint - Configuring SharePoint Portal Server Search

Creating a New Content Source

The first step in configuring SPS search is to create a content source. One way to accomplish this is to use the SearchSetup.exe command-line tool included with the MCMS Connector. This utility can be found in the MCMS 2002 Connector for SharePoint Technologies\WSS\bin folder. The SearchSetup.exe utility creates the necessary content sources in SharePoint as well as all the site rules to include the root channel and all top-level channels in your site hierarchy in order to include and exclude the appropriate content. For more information on the SearchSetup.exe utility, refer to the help included with the MCMS Connector.

Creating a Content Source with the MCMS Connector Utility

Let’s use the MCMS Connector SearchSetup.exe command-line utility to create a new content source and source group:

searchsetup.exe -url "http://www.tropicalgreen.net/TropicalGreen/"
                -crawl "1"
                -user "<domain>\SearchCrawler"
                -password "<password>"
                -portalurl "http://portal.tropicalgreen.net"

The table below describes each of the possible switches:

Now that we have a new content source created, let’s create a new search scope to make it easier to test our search results.

Creating a New Search Scope

While SharePoint is indexing our site, we should go ahead and create a search scope.

1.	Open the General Content Settings and Indexing Status page by browsing to your portal and clicking the Site Settings link in the upper right. Under the Search Settings and Indexed Content section, click the Configure search and indexing link. Then click the Manage search scopes link.
2.	On the Manage Search Scopes page, click the New Search Scope button. When prompted to create a new search scope, enter the following: Field Value Name: TropicalGreen.net (SearchSetup.exe) Topics and Areas: Include no topic or area in this scope Content Source Groups: Limit the scope to the following groups of content sources: CMSChannels
3.	After clicking OK, SharePoint will take us back to the Manage Search Scopes page with our new scope.
4.	Let’s get back to the search configuration page. Click the Site Settings link in the heading of the Manage Search Scopes page. Then click the Configure search and indexing link under the Search Settings and Indexed Content section.
5.	At this point, we should make sure everything is configured correctly. We’ve created a content source and added that source to a new site group. By now, SharePoint should have finished indexing our site (unless you added hundreds of postings to it). Look at the Non-portal content column. If you see errors, warnings, or zero documents indexed, examine the log—some errors might not be errors at all, others may indicate errors within the MCMS site itself. One common error, The address could not be found, is usually caused by links to empty channels that are not configured to use channel rendering scripts. Since we’d expect guests to receive this error when browsing the site, it’s not surprising the SharePoint gatherer ran into the same problem. This is not a problem with the SharePoint index, but rather with the structure or of our site: channels that could be empty should have channel rendering scripts or be hidden from the navigation.
6.	If there are no problems, we can test our index. Click the Home link in the portal navigation to get to the homepage. In the upper-right corner, select TropicalGreen.net (SearchSetup.exe) in the dropdown (the whole name may not appear due to design constraints on the width of the dropdown), enter ficus in the search box, and click the green arrow to execute the search. The search results should find the posting in the plant catalog.

We now have a SharePoint search scope created and indexing our Tropical Green site. While this search scope can be used within the portal to search our site, we will use it via the SPS Query Service Web Service from our MCMS site to provide search functionality to our users.

Creating a Content Source Manually

Another option is to manually create the content source in SharePoint rather than allowing the SearchSetup.exe utility to create it for us. We’ll walk you though these steps so you will have an understanding of what’s involved in creating a content source and source group in a SharePoint portal.

Let’s start by creating an index of our Tropical Green website in our SharePoint portal:

Now we will create the content source.

1.	Under the General Content Settings and Indexing Status section, click the link Add content source.
2.	On the Add Content Source page, select Web page or Web site and click Next.
3.	After selecting that you want to create an external website index, enter the following information on the Add Content Source: Web page or Web site page. Once you have filled out the form, click Finish. Field Value Address: http://www.tropicalgreen.net/TropicalGreen/ Description: Tropical Green web site Crawl Configuration This site – follow links to all pages on this site Participate in adaptive updates Checked If you intend to use the manually-created content source with the MCMS Connector controls, you need to name the content source “CMSChannels” as this name is hard-coded in the connector controls. In this example, the virtual server acting as an MCMS Web Entry Point for our Tropical Green website handles requests for http://www.tropicalgreen.net/. The example will still work if you have set up the Tropical Green website on http://localhost/; you’ll just need to make the appropriate changes in the steps to point to the correct domain.
4.	Once you click Finish in the previous step, SharePoint will create the content source and present you with a confirmation page. At the bottom of the Created Web page or Web site Content Source, in the Start Update section, check the Start full update option and click OK. This will trigger the gatherer to start building an index of the Tropical Green website.

Once you have created a content source manually, follow the instructions under the section Creating a New Search Scope above to create a new source group using the settings in the following table:

Search Rights for the MCMS Application Pool Account

SharePoint portals typically do not allow anonymous users to access the site, and users must log in. The SearchResultControl included with the MCMS Connector, which we’ll use in a moment, uses the account of the application pool identity that contains the MCMS site from which a search query is triggered to access the SharePoint search service.

Our MCMS site now has the permissions needed to log in to our portal and execute a search.