Creating a Watch Folder
This procedure can be repeated as many times for as many ‘Watch Folders’ (WF) as you require.
It is recommended that you only define WFs for folders where they contain files you want indexing, not for entire volumes or large parent directories. Do not set C:\ as a watch folder as the computer will take hours to identify files as well as index them. Similarly, picking My Documents as a WF will cause indexing of all files within all folders. This would take a long time but might also allow searches of private documents that you do not want to share.
Virtual Web Directories
To allow contents of the WF to be accessible across an intranet you must make the folder into a Virtual web directory. To do this, navigate to the folder from ‘My Computer’ and click ‘Properties’.
Select Web Sharing.
Select ‘Share this Folder’.
In this case the folder is called ‘Research’. It defaults the ‘Alias’ to this name, unless it already exists. Feel free to change this but you must remember what you called it.
Click OK.
Now go to the TRIST tool and select ‘Add Watch’.
Navigate to the folder you just web-shared and click ‘Open’.
You now have to enter the URL required for someone browsing the site to access the files within that folder.
If you work locally the example given will suffice, ‘http://localhost/research’. If access is intranet based, then you need to substitute localhost with the address of the machine hosting the site. This can take the form of ‘http://computername/research’ or in a static IP network ‘http://192.32.63.101/research’ where 192.32.63.101 is the IP number of the hosting computer.
If you intend to host the search results within another web-site then the URL would need to reflect the necessary hyperlink to get to the source documents from the search pages. If the search pages index a subfolder of a web-site then the URL might only need be ‘research’ or ‘../research’. More examples of the specifics of this value can be found in the advanced topics.
This example assumes the pages are stored on a machine called intranet-pages.
Click ‘OK’.
You have now defined your first watch folder. Repeat this process for as many folders as you require.