[MOSS2007] Crawling schedule alternative

[ISSUE]
On a customer environment, we were having some issues with the default search scheduler. On this environment we currently have more than 4.8 million items in the index and migrations are still happening. This means that incremental crawls run for several hours and sometimes even more than 24 hours.

By default it is only possible to schedule it once a day maximum (so not once every two days) and according to a Microsoft engineer, it is not advised to run a crawl when a previous crawl is still running. Somehow that can result in a corrupt SSP. Configuring a schedule to run each 15 minutes is therefore not an option.

[SOLUTION]
To solve this issue, I have created a PowerShell script. This script checks if a crawl is running and if not, starts a new incremental crawl. I have scheduled this script to run every 15 minutes.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load("Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c") | out-null
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load("Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c") | out-null
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load("Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c") | out-null

$serverContext = [Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext]::Default
$context = [Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchContext]::GetContext($serverContext)

$sspcontent = new-object Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.Content($context)
$sspContentSources = $sspcontent.ContentSources

foreach ($cs in $sspContentSources)
{
  if ($cs.Name -eq "Local Office SharePoint Server sites")
  {
    Write-Host "NAME: ", $cs.Name, " - ", $cs.CrawlStatus
    if ($cs.CrawlStatus -eq [Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.CrawlStatus]::Idle)
    {
      Write-Host "Starting Incremental crawl"
      $cs.StartIncrementalCrawl();
    }
    else
    {
        Write-Host "Crawl running"
    }
  }
}