About using the Business Data Catalog

Because SharePoint Server’s Business Data Catalog (BDC) can consolidate metadata from multiple data sources, in order for it to index (crawl) a vault’s metadata, it needs to know how the metadata is stored and how to access it. Specifying this information is accomplished by performing the following steps in the order listed:

1. Specifying the content access account
2. Specifying the properties to search
3. Importing the application definition file
4. Granting content access account permissions
5. Specifying a crawl rule
6. Specifying file types
7. Registering a security trimmer
8. Specifying content sources

Before you can use the BDC in SharePoint Server to search documents, you must first crawl (index) the documents that you want to make available to search queries. Crawling content is the process by which the system accesses vault properties or parses document content to build an index from which search queries can be serviced. The system does not change the documents in the vaults. Instead, the documents in the vaults are read, and the text or metadata for those documents is sent to the index server to be indexed.

There are two types of crawls that are supported by the BlueCielo Web Service:

• Full crawl. A crawl of all content even if the content already exists in the index.
• Incremental crawl. A crawl of only modified content. A full crawl for a particular content source must be run before an incremental crawl.

Each of the preceding steps is described in the following topics.