Document Index

[Michael McGinley]

We would like to implement a web solution that will index a about 2000
documents. The documents can be sorted by a number of different categories.
Does anyone know if we can accomplish this fairly easily with WSS or SPS?
Basically, looking for a Document Library Index.
Thanks in advance.

[James Price]

Michael,

The short answer is that yes either WSS or SPS will do that for you.
The long answer is there are a lot of variables that will affect how easy
this is to implement. One of the first things to consider is how you plan
or organize the documents, i.e. are you going to import them into WSS/SPS or
are you going to leave them where they are (on a file server)? Another big
factor in indexing is what type of documents are they? WSS/SPS supports
indexing most Office and email based document types automatically, however
you may need to add iFilter plug-ins to support additional types of document
types i.e. AutoCAD, PDF, TIFF, etc. There a several free plug-ins available
and it's pretty straight forward to install them. As a side note, although
installing an iFilter will allow WSS/SPS to correctly index additional
document types it doesn't make WSS/SPS correctly display the document icons,
if you need help with that let me know, it's in the documentation but not
completely straight forward if you are new to WSS/SPS.
Now from a long term design perspective if indexing accuracy and easy of
accessibility is going to be an important part of you project I'd recommend
importing the documents into WSS/SPS and designing multiple document
libraries to contain the documents that will make sense to you or to your
business. Doing so will make it easier to manage you document content and
improve you search performance. If you use SPS over WSS (though WSS can do
it to a lesser degree) you can enable full text indexing of content on you
documents, that will dramatically improve access to you information and your
ability to leverage the existing base of knowledge in your company. Another
thing to consider is the accuracy of document properties, the meta data that
is indexed is defined in the indexing properties for document types, you can
add or remove indexed fields as you work with it over time. I commonly
find that document that are created in an "unmanaged" environment often do
not contain any data in the many document property fields, while this isn't
a deal breaker it can often produce interesting search results. For example
when was the last time you saw someone create a Word document and before
they saved it, edit the document properties to include: Title, Subject,
Author, Manager, Company, Category, Keywords, Comments or a add any one of
the 21 predefined custom properties? These properties (and they exist for
almost all document types like PDF and DWG) are the fields that are indexed,
so if they are blank or incorrect because a template document is copied and
reused then it can add to your challenge in implementing a good document
index.

Now that I've made it seem extra hard, let me say both WSS and SPS make
getting all of this done pretty easy; you may need to spend some time
"tuning" it to make it better but you can do the basics in a few hours.

James E. Price III
Fairway Consulting Group, Inc.
O: 954-727-5126
W: www.fcgroup.us
E: jpr...@fcgroup.us

"Michael McGinley" <michaelf...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
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