SharePoint 2013 Search Fileshare & Reporting/Auditing/Monitoring Search

Question

My company is using SharePoint 2013 for our intranet.

All is working ok - however we want to use the great new 2013 search capabilities especially to our fileshare content.

The problem is that we are pretty sure that a lot of the documents and folders haven't been locked down much. There are a lot of documents (a few million) so we aren't easily able to review this - just perform some sampling.

At the very least if we do look at crawling the fileshare I'd like to be able to provide a quick sanity check that there isn't anything too onerous that we have crawled - e.g. references to passwords, hr info etc.

Can anyone offer any suggestions?

Also moving forward, is there any way I can report/audit/track/monitor specific terms people are searching for and the actual results that come back?

Answer 1

I've had pretty much the same requirement for a while now and agree with Matt for the most part.

If you can then ideally move suitable files (e.g. office docs, not binary files such as exe, msi etc.) off the share into a document management system, such as SharePoint and archive off any legacy files.

This would typically be a reasonable sized project and there is plenty of guidance around (e.g. http://blogs.technet.com/b/ptsblog/archive/2013/11/04/migrating-file-shares-to-sharepoint-online.aspx)

The key as Matt says is that someone needs to own permissions - i.e. you to establish a Governance model - which will require planning/design.

Now for the search specific component of your question - one tool that I did come across recently that addresses similar requirements you have - i.e. the searching/monitoring/reporting is pretty cool and called 'SPSearchMon'.

Essentially I've been using it to monitor search as an end user would experience - with screenshots of the search results page for specific queries and lists of search results being recorded, and I can export the results to Excel. It also monitors the search performance which is quite nifty.

Note: It wasn't free though still pretty cheap and worth it because we use search pretty heavily.

Definitely worth a look for your particular scenario - https://secure.kenzaisoftware.com/product/spsearchmon/

HTH

Answer 2

In my opinion - if there's a risk of passwords being in that store, then do not crawl it.

It doesn't matter who decides to have the responsibility, or who dodges it - if that risk is there the mitigation is not to crawl that store, and just to use whatever new file storage/sharing technology you decide to go with (File shares, SharePoint, OneDrive for Biz, etc), and crawl that with search instead.

Answer 3

I agree with James, but to add a bit more advice:

1. Someone has to take ownership of permissions. One technique is to create a new top level folder and as you determine the content is either "safe for search" or needs security, move the content to the new folder and apply the necessary permissions.
2. You can try to search for terms like "password", "salary" the CEO's Name, etc, but as James indicated, this is less than ideal.
3. The other concern is do you plan to continue using the file server? If so there is not only an issue today for a breech, but tomorrow as well as users may be unaware that their current save location is less than secure.
4. The query reports will display the keywords folks are using against the content. If you use the same keywords you will see the results that the user saw (provided you have their level of security on the content or above)