SharePoint Search Crawls : Incremental Cawls for Day to Day living

I was at Microsoft the other day talking to some of their PFEs regarding all things bright and SharePoint. The topic of search crawls came up. I received some information which I wasn't aware of which I thought I would log.
As most of us are aware SharePoint Search can conduct a "Full crawl" and an "Incremental crawl". What most people do (myself included in the past) is schedule a full crawl late evening / early morning and schedule incremental crawls at regular intervals throughout the day. To be honest I'm not sure where this habit came from. I guess it just seems to make sense......except it doesn't.

A scheduled Incremental crawl is sufficient for day to day crawling. There is no need and as far as MS have informed me, no advantage in running Full crawls on a regular basis. Full crawls are only required if a crawl rule or crawl property has been changed (there might be another couple of situations - but these are config changes).

All changes are stored in a change database and this is what the incremental crawl looks at to see what it needs to update. The changes database automatically clears down so you don't need to worry about it getting too big. There is one caveat and that is that the change database does clear itself after a certain amount of time so you have to make sure you do your incremental crawl within this time. This period is in the region of 30 days so assuming that you are going to schedule incremental crawls more frequently than this you are ok.

So, for day to day search indexing, only schedule incremental crawls.

SharePoint 2010 Send Documents to Records Centre Link

So I was wanting to know how to send documents to a record centre manually. Took me a little while to do the digging to find out were you configure the "Send to" links so I thought I would do a quick post to remind myself.

Assuming you all ready have a record store in place and you know the location. You must go to:

Central administration -> General application settings (on left hand side) -> Configure Send to connections

Once on this page you can add a new send to connection for a specific web application.
For sending records to the records centre you set the URL to be:

http://ServerNameOrAAM/RecordCenterSiteName/_vti_bin/officialfile.asmx

Once you have done this you are able to specify whether you need to copy, move or move  the document leaving a stub in its place.

Copying dlls to and from the GAC in Windows server 2008

I have always had a cold feeling when attempting to add dlls to the gac on Windows server 200. This post here sorted me out although I did have to steal gacutil from my dev machine.

Installing an assembly into gac from windows server 2008

It also can be tough getting dlls from out of the GAC. This post hightlights the process for successfully copying all the dlls from the GAC into a specified folder.

Copying files from the gac

Very helpful when you have TFS With SharePoint WSS3.0 and for some reason content is referencing MOSS dlls.........the things we have to deal with hey.