In simple terms; a catalog is a collection of documents containing text which can be indexed by the Microsoft Indexing Service™. Once indexed, these documents form part of the Self Service Portals knowledge base and can be searched by users in order to find solutions to specific problems
The types of documents that can be indexed include:
· Microsoft Office™ documents
· HTML documents
· Text / Rich Text documents
Documents that generate their content dynamically such as asp pages should not be included in a catalog because the Indexing Service™ will be unable to create an index of their content. Image files will also not be indexed.
Once new content has been added to a catalog; the operating system will re-index the content automatically at a convenient time so that any new content will be available to users as soon as possible.
The Microsoft Indexing Service™ is a free product and is installed with Windows XP™ and Vista™ operating systems as standard. All Indexing should take place on the web server hosting the Self Service Portal and so any document directories to be indexed must be available to the server in question.