Microsoft Index Server

White Paper

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Microsoft Index
Server

Microsoft Index Server brings the power of searching popularized by the World Wide Web to corporate intranets, Internet sites, and other networks—without requiring the reformatting of documents. Microsoft Index Server is shipped as part of Windows NT Server 4.0 and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). Users fill in a form from any Web browser that lets them search against contents and various document properties, such as author or title.

Introduction

The popularity and growth of the World Wide Web can be traced in large part to the ease of finding information stored on Web servers using a Web browser. New users are often amazed at how easily they can search certain sites and access a global collection of electronic information. However, the tools to make these searches possible have traditionally been expensive and difficult to set up and maintain.

Microsoftâ Index Server is integrated with Microsoft Internet Information Server 2.0 (IIS) and the Windows NT® Server 4.0 operating system to easily bring the power of Web searching to corporate intranets and Internet sites. Once installed, it automatically builds an index of your Web server that can be easily searched from any Web browser with the sample query forms.

Indexing maps words to documents, and to locations within documents. The same way that an index in a book maps an important word to a page inside the book, content indexing on a computer takes a word within a document and maps it back to that document. Where other Web Servers are limited to searching only HTML pages, Microsoft Index Server uses open standard content filters to index any file type, including Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel documents. There is no need to change the way your business works just to share documents over an intranet.

Microsoft Index Server is designed so that the indexing process occurs behind the scenes, requiring no user input and minimizing demands on system resources. Searches are made by simply filling in fields in a query form, which allows users to focus on what they are looking for according to a variety of parameters, including directory, subject, author, date, and file type. Because the query forms are created using open industry standards such as HTML, they can be easily customized to meet the needs of any site and can be used from any Web browser.

Network administrators and Webmasters, as well as end users, benefit from Microsoft Index Server features. These include:

• Full-text indexing. Users can search for a set of words or phrases, or even a complete sentence.
• Query by properties. Users can search for properties stored on files such as author, subject, file size, and date.
• "Fuzzy" queries. Users can search with wildcards, regular expression matching, and linguistic stemming to find all tenses of a verb.
• Advanced searches. Users can search with combinations of all the above, including proximity for words near other words, numeric operators (<, =, >), and Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT).
• Customizable query forms. Webmasters can predefine popular queries, and create custom searches and results pages.
• Zero maintenance. Index server automatically updates when documents are changed, added, or deleted.
• Integrated security. Users are only shown documents that they have permission to view.

With its ability to index a wide spectrum of file types and work across distributed systems, Microsoft Index Server brings to enterprise computing the valuable Web browser searching ability that was once restricted to only HTML pages, or expensive, proprietary servers.

Taking a Closer Look

Microsoft Index Server indexes the full text and properties of documents stored on Microsoft Internet Information Server, and allows users to search the server using any World Wide Web browser by filling in the fields of a query form. The Web server forwards the query form to the query engine, which finds the pertinent documents and returns the results to the client, formatted as a Web page. In addition to HTML and text files, Index Server can index the full text contents and property values of formatted documents, such as those created by Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. This allows an organization to publish its existing documents directly on its intranet without having to convert everything to HTML.