SharePoint: Configuring Foundation Search

You’ve got SharePoint installed.  You’re generating content.  Now you’d like it if that little Search bar on the top right actually returned something other than:

• Your search cannot be completed because this site is not assigned to an indexer.  Contact your administrator for more information.

The first step is to turn on the Foundation Search Service.  You do that with the following:

1. Open Central Administration
2. Go to System Settings -> Manage services on server
3. Click on SharePoint Foundation Search
4. Assign a service account to start the service (this is a managed account, so select on or add a new one)
5. Assign a content access account (more on that below)
6. Enter a database server and database name (or accept the defaults)
7. Choose an indexing schedule
8. Click Ok
9. When you return to the Manage services on server page, click Start next to SharePoint Foundation Search

That’s only the first part, however.  You’ve got the Search service running and the indexer on a schedule, but you actually have not yet identified what to index.  In standard and enterprise version of search, you get a full blown service application and a lot of that configuration takes place there.  However, that’s not the case with foundation search, so let’s continue.

The next thing that you need to do grant the content access account (that you entered above) read access to your applications.  Do this:

1. Go to Central Administration
2. Go to Application Management -> Manage web applications
3. Highlight the web application that you want foundation search to index
4. Click User Policy in the ribbon
5. In the Policy for Web Application box that appears, click Add Users
6. Leave the Zone selection at (All zones), click Next
7. In the Choose Users box, enter the username of the Content Access Account you used above when you configured SharePoint Foundation Search
8. Check Full Read for permissions
9. Click Finish

Alright.  Now you have the indexer running and the content access account has privileges to read all of the content in your web application.  But you still haven’t identified the content to crawl.  That’s done at the content database level. So:

1. Go to Central Administration
2. Go to Application Management -> Manage Content Database Settings
3. Click on the content database that contains the site(s)/site collection(s) that you want to index
4. In the settings for that content database, in the section Search Server, use the drop down list to select the server with SharePoint Foundation Search service running
5. Click OK.

Viola!  You have turned on and set a schedule for indexing, granted permissions for the crawl account, and identified content to crawl.  More than likely, you’re done.  Based on the schedule that you created in the first part, and the amount of data that you need to crawl, you may need to wait a little while to check to see if everything is working.