Indexing Service at Your Fingertips

Organizations face a problem: To avoid losing precious time and resources, employees need to locate documents quickly and accurately. Given the wide use of Microsoft Office, Web documents, email systems, and other information systems, having an effective means to access and track documents in various systems is vital. To address this need in Windows NT, Microsoft introduced Index Server. The most recent NT release, Index Server 2.0, ships with the NT 4.0 Option Pack. Microsoft renamed the newest version of this tool Indexing Service 3.0, which comes as part of Windows 2000.

Understanding how Indexing Service works is easy. After you install Indexing Service, it searches the system and builds catalogs that contain an index of file-system items and their property information. The program runs periodically to update the catalogs. Each time a user performs a search in the catalogs, the search uses the index.

By default, Indexing Service creates the System catalog, which contains an index of all files, except for temporary Internet and history files, on the local drives. If Microsoft IIS is running on the system, Indexing Service also creates a Web catalog and indexes the folders that Table 1, page 108, shows.

Microsoft recommends that you turn off virus scanning when you run Indexing Service. Therefore, you might want to use a virus scanner that you can schedule to shut down when the indexing process starts.

Indexing Service uses filter components to read and process information from files and other systems. Win2K's Indexing Service includes filters for MIME messages and Microsoft Office, HTML, and plaintext files. You can also develop and install custom filters.

For information about installing Index Server, see T.J. Harty, "Microsoft's Index Server," January 1997. During Win2K installation, Indexing Service automatically installs (the OS has the Indexing Service check box selected by default). To manage the service, you use the Computer Management tool or the Indexing Service Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in. To start Indexing Service, go to Start, Programs, Administrative Tools, and select Computer Management from the menu. From the Services and Applications folder, right-click the Indexing Service subfolder and select Start. After the service starts, it will scan your system and prepare the default catalogs. This process can take several minutes because the service scans and reads the files. You'll notice the hard disk or disks on your system churning during this process.

After the indexing process completes, users can use one of several interfaces and methods to search for items. When possible, the Windows Start menu's Search function will query the index catalogs to obtain a result. Users can also use a Web form or a custom application to perform queries. A developer merely needs to add a query for an application that can search Indexing Service. To submit queries, administrators can use the MMC snap-in's Query the Catalog page for each index in the Indexing Service folder. Custom applications can specify the catalog to query.

Creating Catalogs
You can also use the Indexing Service MMC snap-in to create catalogs. Custom catalogs are useful when you want to create an index that represents either a subset or superset of files or data. For example, imagine you need to publish a catalog of all your organization's engineering documents that relate to development. You can create a new catalog and configure it to index only the directories that have development-related documents.

When creating a catalog, you need to name the catalog and select a folder in which to store it. You can store the folder on any local drive. Use an explicit name for this folder to avoid confusion about its contents or purpose. Figure 1 shows the IndexingServiceCatalogs folder, which I use to store catalogs.

To create a catalog, right-click Computer Management's Indexing Service folder, select New Catalog, type the name for the catalog, select the folder for the catalog, then stop and restart the service. The last step is necessary because the program adds the catalog only after the service stops and restarts.

   Previous  [1]  2  Next