MOSS 2007 BDC Search Scope - Tricks for young players

I was recently demonstrating MOSS (level 200) to a customer and there was a lot of interest in the Business Data Catalogue (BDC). Without previously preparing a detailed demonstration I was asked to explain and walk them through how they could create a Search Scope against the data being indexed in the BDC.

Fortunately I had a sample BDC installed and functional and continued the now increasingly high risk demo. I stumbled around in the Search Scope settings of the Site Collection trying to create a scope with a rule that only included BDC data; however it is not possible to create a new rule from within the Site Collection scopes that use the BDC, where a Shared Scope has not been previously configured.

To create a rule that includes the BDC you must first create a Shared Scope from the Shared Service Provider search settings; depicted below. This Shared Scope can then be leveraged by rules associated to scopes created in the Site Collection Search Scopes. Make sense?

The second image below also shows how you can optionally have an additional tab in Search Centre that only returns results from your custom Scope. Cool!