By Spike Xavier

  • 10/07/2014

In this article I will configure the SharePoint 2013 Search Service Application to include a File Share in its search results.

I will first create a file share using Server Manager and will call the file share “resumes.” It will be stored in a folder named resumes which is located on the C: drive of the SP SQL machine. I have several simple word documents inside the folder with simple resumes that contain some information about a few fake employees.

For my development topology I have two Hyper-V virtual machines on the same private network, both using Windows Server 2012 SP1 as the Operating System. One is the domain controller and the other is a member server (with SharePoint 2013 running all roles and SQL Server 2012 installed on it).

The process for planning and configuring file shares is not the focus of this article. That process alone is worthy of at least a very long book chapter. The procedures I use will work in my development environment but may not be suitable for production environments. I would perform the same procedures in my production’s SharePoint environment as far as adding content sources that I do in this article. The file share stuff is normally in the hands of the network administrator.

The trickiest part for me always seems to be the permissions of the share or the SMB profile of the share.

Content access accounts can be specific to crawled sources if needed. If a specific content access account is not specified, the default content access account is used. That is what I’ll do here. The default content access account is a domain account called SPService for this article.

The steps I will take:

  • Create a file share for a folder named “resumes”
  • Try a search for a string in one of the resumes
  • Create a content source using the file share
  • Perform a full crawl of the content source
  • Try a search again
  • Validate success

In my development SharePoint environment, I have a SPWebApplication mapped to the host header: sharepoint.local on port 80. It is using the default service application proxy group which contains a search service application, and I have a few site collections.

One of them has the top-level site of template based on the enterprise search center located at http://sharepoint.local/sites/search, which I will use to enter my queries.

Please note, I am a member of the farm administrators group and a site collection administrator on all the site collections. Let’s get started. Click here to continue