This tutorial walks through the steps necessary to crawl Socialcast repository using the Socialcast connector. You may wish to read through the instructions first so that you can gather up the information needed to input the crawling parameters.
Before Beginning: Add/Create User Account
A prerequisite for crawling Socialcast is to have a Socialcast account. This account should have sufficient permissions to crawl documents for indexing. So it should have access to all the groups (including private groups) that you want to crawl. Yo may add an existing user account or create new one. If you are creating new one the recommended name for this account is "aspire_crawl_account" or something similar.
The username and password for this account will be required below.
Step 1: Set Socialcast Access Rights
The "aspire_crawl_account" will need to have sufficient access rights to read all of the documents in Socialcast that you wish to crawl.
To set the rights for your "aspire_crawl_account", do the following:
- Log into the Socialcast as an administrator.
- Click on Settings icon next to your user name (in the top of the right hand) and select admin settings.
- In the left hand side menu click on ‘User Management’ under ‘Community Management’.
- Select "aspire_crawl_account" (Assume you have already set up this user).
- Click on Actions icon for "aspire_crawl_account" and click ‘Edit’
- Under User type click on Member
- To add this user as an Admin, check Admin checkbox.
- Now this user is an Admin now and have Full Control (so that it has access to all Socialcast content).
- Add newly created admin user account to all the groups that you want to crawl.
You may skip step 1 to 6 if you want to add an existing account. You will need this login information later in these procedures, when entering properties for your Socialcast Connector.
Step 4: Initiate an Incremental Crawl
If you only want to process content updates from Socialcast (documents which are added, modified, or removed), then click on the "Run" button when the crawl type is “incremental” link selected. The Socialcast 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 "incremental" link does the same thing as the "Full" link selected. Both will crawl the entire content source and submit all documents. Thereafter, if you click on “Run” button when crawl type is "incremental" it will only crawl updates.
Scheduled crawls are always "Incremental” crawls. This means that the first scheduled job will perform a "Full" crawl, and jobs after that will perform "update" crawls. Statistics are reset for every crawl.
Statistics are reset for every crawl.
Group Expansion
Group expansion configuration is done on the "Advanced Connector Properties" of the Connector tab.
- Click on the Advanced Configuration checkbox to enable the advanced properties section.
- Scroll down to Group Expansion and click the checkbox.
- Set the Socialcast url, user name and password of Socialcast repository.
- Set an schedule for group expansion refresh and cleanup.
Limitations
- Crawling account should have access to all the groups (including private groups) that you want to crawl. With default settings administrator can't access private groups as well (if he is not a member of that group). But company can request community administrator access to private groups. Please check "Accessing Private Groups" section in Socialcast documentation. Also as a workaround for this, crawling user can be added to all the groups in Socialcast site (as a member).
- If the crawling user is not belongs to a conversation, then crawling user can't access the content of that conversation. In that case we can't crawl the conversation. Please check "Private messages" section in Socialcast documentation.
- Socialcat has user type called "External contributors" and external contributors have limited access to site content. Our Socialcast connector doesn't support external contributors. And we assume search is only available for internal members.