This tutorial walks through the steps necessary to crawl SharePoint using the Aspire 2.0 SharePoint connector.
A prerequisite for crawling SharePoint is to have a Windows Active Directory account. The domain, username and password for this account will be required below.
The recommended name for this account is "aspire_crawl_account". See prerequisites section for more details.
If you wish to have all features of the Aspire SharePoint connector available, including full document-level security, you will need to install the Aspire SharePoint Web Services Extension.
See Standard or Extended SharePoint Web Services for details on what features are enabled with this extension.
Installing the extension is optional at this point. If you wish to install it now, follow the instructions at SharePoint Web Services Extension.
"aspire_crawl_account" will need to have sufficient access rights to read all of the documents in SharePoint that you wish to process. See Windows User Account Requirements for details on what rights will be required for the account in SharePoint.
To set the rights for your account at Web Application level, do the following (SP 2010):
To set the rights for your "aspire_crawl_count" on site collections, do the following:
Launch Aspire (if it's not already running). See:
To specify exactly what shared folder to crawl, we will need to create a new "Content Source".
To create a new content source:
In the "General" tab in the Content Source Configuration window, specify basic information for the content source:
After selecting a Scheduled, specify the details, if applicable:
In the "Connector" tab, specify the connection information to crawl SharePoint.
For additional information on the connector's specific properties see SharePoint 2010 Configuration.
In the "Workflow" tab, specify the workflow steps for the jobs that come out of the crawl. Drag and drop rules to determine which steps should an item follow after being crawled. This rules could be where to publish the document or transformations needed on the data before sending it to a search engine. See Workflow for more information.
After completing this steps click on the Save then Done and you'll be sent back to the Home Page.
Now that the content source is set up, the crawl can be initiated.
The status will show RUNNING while the crawl is going, and CRAWLED when it is finished.
If there are errors, you will get a clickable "Error" flag that will take you to a detailed error message page.
If you only want to process content updates from the SharePoint 2010 (documents which are added, modified, or removed), then click on the "Incremental" button instead of the "Full" button. The SharePoint 2010 connector will automatically identify only changes which have occurred since the last crawl.
If this is the first time that the connector has crawled, the action of the "Incremental" button depends on the exact method of change discovery. It may perform the same action as a "Full" crawl crawling everything, or it may not crawl anything. Thereafter, the Incremental button will only crawl updates.
Group expansion configuration is done on the "Advanced Connector Properties" of the Connector tab.