Special Edition Using Microsoft® SharePoint Portal Server

General Overview

One way that portals like SharePoint provide great value to their users is by facilitating search capabilities. Sometimes the documents being searched reside locally on the portal, and sometimes they reside external to the portal. Given that it is impractical to physically copy every potential document that may be leveraged by an organization to the “local” portal disk subsystem, the concept of crawling evolved. Crawling allows for content that is stored both locally and on remote systems to be indexed locally, such that a search for a particular word, phrase, or metadata field can be addressed by simply searching one or more indexes maintained on the local SharePoint server.

Regardless of how “wide” or “deep” a portal crawls, ...