Configuring result source to query a remote SharePoint farm

Question

I have 2 SharePoint 2013 farms, Farm A is indexing the local SharePoint sites and a file share. When I search Farm A I get results from the SharePoint sites and the file share; everything works as expected. For Farm B I have set up a content result source for a remote SharePoint farm(Farm A). When Farm B searches using the result source I get results from Farm A, but the results do not include the file share only the SharePoint content from Farm A. I have checked the search terms from Farm A and I get both SharePoint content and the file share. The question I have is, does result source for a remote SharePoint farm include everything that is indexed from the remote farm or just SharePoint content only??

Answer 1

When you set up a remote result source you must type in the address of the root site collection of the remote SharePoint farm. It then retrieves results for URL's within this farm without using any remote result source. It does not use the "Local SharePoint Results" result source of the remote farm.

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Answer 2

Steve - Thanks for the information. Just to make sure I understand what you are saying, when you use remote result source, search looks at the root site collection and returns results for the URL's within the farm. If this farm has indexed file shares we won't see these results because it is not using "Local SharePoint Results" (which would include the file share)

Answer 3

Correct

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Answer 4

Using the result source, is it possible at all to get file share results from a remote SharePoint farm? It appears that the only option would be to index the file shares and we have a distributed environment all over the world. We want to be able to search from any farm within our environment and pull results (file shares included) from all farms.

Answer 5

If you're in a globally dispersed environment with n+1 farms you should probably look to having a global search farm and each content farm then subscribes to that search service. Then you index everything once, and search everything from anywhere. The other option (though not nearly as clean) is to have each of the sharepoint farms subscribe to the others search service. However, this can be a bit messy to the end user as you can't have multiple search services within a single web app.

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Answer 6

Unfortunately not with file shares. You could subscribe to a remote SP2013 farm, but this would require setting up one farm that would crawl all the dispersed file shares. Remote results were meant to alleviate this and not require sending content over a wan.

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Answer 7

If you're in a globally dispersed environment with n+1 farms you should probably look to having a global search farm and each content farm then subscribes to that search service. Then you index everything once, and search everything from anywhere. The other option (though not nearly as clean) is to have each of the sharepoint farms subscribe to the others search service. However, this can be a bit messy to the end user as you can't have multiple search services within a single web app.

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In addition, the implementation would require you to share the Search Service Application across multiple farms.  To get started on that, start here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621100.aspx

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I trust that answers your question...

Thanks
C
http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog | LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | Quix Utilities for SharePoint | SharePoint Admin Nav Console (SPANC)

Answer 8

You might want to check this blog post (thanks Steve Peschka) which claims it's possible to query not only sharepoint result sources.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2013/01/24/getting-a-full-result-set-from-a-remote-sharepoint-index-in-sharepoint-2013.aspx