Windows Desktop Search: Searching Sharepoint

I'm getting on very well with Windows Desktop Search (see earlier post). The integration with Outlook is better than I had with Google Desktop.

One more thing will make my life much easier: the ability to trawl a cetain remote Sharepoint site. I have access to the site in question using Windows authentication and the WebDav (aka web folder) address of http://somesite/Intranet/Hidden Folder/InterestingDocuments.

I don't think there is any way to point WDS at a web folder - I tried specifying one in the UNC box but it wasn't accepted.

On the other hand it is just about possible to mount a web folder as a drive letter and get WDS to index it.

I hit some problems in my situation:

• I don't have access to Intranet, only to the folders underneath.
• Hidden Folder has a space in it - and the net use command fails with this, even if it is encoded as %20.
  

These are surmountable if I mount the hidden level as a drive letter and then explicity add the folders underneath to the list of folders to index.

Mapping the Drive

In a command prompt:

net use M: "http://somesite/Intranet" /persistent:yes

A dir m:\ shows no files because it is hidden from me. This is okay - I don't have permission to list the folder contents but I can access folders underneath if I know their names.

Indexing the Folder

To add the original folder to WDS, I opened the Indexing Options in Control Panel, clicked Advanced and then added m:\
Hidden Folder/InterestingDocuments under the Add UNC Location tab.

That's it - just let the indexing engine gradually trawl the sharepoint folders across the network.

Searching

Searches will then include results from the sharepoint folders, but if I want to I can add a search condition to only search under those folders:

e.g. title:"Web Services" kind:docs under:InterestingDocuments