The SharePoint 2013 Scanner component performs full and incremental scans over a SharePoint 2013 repository, maintaining the last SharePoint change token of the repository to get updates next time an incremental crawl is executed. Updated content is then submitted to the configured pipeline in AspireObjects attached to Jobs. As well as the URL of the changed item, the AspireObject will also contain metadata extracted from the repository. Updated content is split in to three types: add, update, and delete. Each type of content is published on a different event so that it may be handled by different Aspire pipelines.

The scanner reacts to an incoming job. This job may instruct the scanner to start, stop, pause, resume or cacheGroups. Typically the start job will contain all information required by the job to perform the crawl. However, the scanner can be configured with default values via application.xml file. When pausing or stopping, the scanner will wait until all the jobs it published have completed before itself completing.