Searching Fileshares in MOSS 2007

Searching Fileshares in MOSS 2007

Searching fileshares in MOSS 2007 is very easy. I always considered this feature to be very useful and this was one of my  favorite features in SPS 2003. Following are the steps (with screenshots) required to create a fileshare in MOSS 2007:

1. Go to "SharePoint Central Administration" and select a "Shared Service" that is associated with the application in which you want to show the results of a fileshare search. You can create a new "Shared Service" as well if you intend to create a new application. You can also associate your existing "Shared Service" with the new (to be created) sites. To do this, go to "Shared Services Administration" and change the default SSP by clicking "Change Default SSP". This will automatically associate your newly created sites with an existing (default) SSP.

2. In your selected SSP, click the "Search Settings" link.

3. In the "Configure Search Settings" page, click the "Content sources" link.

4. In the "Manage Content Sources" page, click the "New Content Source" link.

5. Add a name for your content source in the "Name:" field and select "File Shares" as the content type. In the start address box, add your fileshare. This should be a shared folder, for example, file://sp/test. In this case, "sp" is your machine name and "test" is the shared folder on machine "sp".

6. Check the "Start full crawl of this content source" checkbox and click "OK". "Manage Content Sources" page will show the status as "Crawling Full". Refresh the page and you will notice that the status has been changed to "Idle". Crawling might take some time, depending on the size of the shared folder.

7. Now, go to your SharePoint site and try to find a file using a keyword in the search box. SharePoint will return the file against the keyword you enter.