Use SharePoint Search to crawl Project Server project metadata?

Question

Our environment consists of Project Server 2007 and MOSS 2007. We have around 750 projects and lots of "Enterprise Custom Fields" set up to track all of the metadata associated with a project.

Our main requirement is to be able to search/filter/group/sort all of these projects by metadata in SharePoint. Our current process involves syncing this custom metadata into a SharePoint list (which requires a LOT of maintenance). Instead, I would like to get rid of this sync and set up the search service to crawl Project Server metadata directly.

Question: Is it possible to leverage SharePoint search to crawl/index these metadata fields in Project Server? How would I go about setting this up?

Answer 1

Here are some ideas:

• link the BDC to the Project Server reporting database so it can be indexed (e.g. see Sahil Malik's blog)

• use an alternative search engine to index the Project Server reporting database (e.g. FAST)

• write custom code to promote Project Server metadata into a SharePoint list so it can be indexed

Answer 2

As Project sites are based on WSS Sites, I bet you can add a custom Crawl Source pointing to the Project site to index it (I would even say you can choose to crawl it as a SharePoint site - should this not work, you can always add it as an external web content).

At this point, if your "Custom Metadata" is set to be crawled, you should be seeing the Custom Metadata added as crawled/managed properties in the SSP store after having crawled the Project site.

Hope this helps (I haven't done it myself, but I bet this can work. Let me know :) )