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I'd written an article a couple of months ago about leveraging Microsoft Indexing Services in the enterprise to facilitate searching network shares and publishing an ASP interface to an intranet for your users. My environment consists of a Windows 2003 Standard server providing the Indexing Services, a second AD / ASP / MS SQL 2k Windows 2003 Standard server with attached SAN and numerous network shares holding nearly 1tb in size, indexed by the Indexing Server. The Indexing Server also hosts the ASP pages for user searches. I've found out several things lately about Indexing Services, and would like to take a moment to point out some basic principle's of this technology: It's not necessary for the windows workstations to have Indexing Services enabled to enjoy a speedy network file search experience. In fact, many people will recommend that this service be turned off and disabled on workstations, since it can slow performance. To give Windows Desktop Search (WDS) th...

There are quite a few tutorials on the internet about Indexing Service, but I found none that showed me all of what I planned to accomplish in my environment. This prompted me to write this HowTo. Microsoft's description of it is "Indexing Service is a base service for Microsoft® Windows® 2000 or later that extracts content from files and constructs an indexed catalog to facilitate efficient and rapid searching.". My goal was to leverage this technology to aid my users in searching for documents in our network shares. We have a number of them, and I've found that even if you attempt to promote good "house cleaning" rules, you invariably end up with a mass of documents that can become difficult to circumnavigate. This usually results in frequent phone calls like, "Have you seen this?". Nope, haven't seen it, but if you call Bill, I bet he knows... While MS Indexing Service, or Desktop Search, works well when tuned properly for the end u...