The following tasks are available for configuring the user interface:

• Setting Search Preferences
• Generating Search Statistics
• Providing Information About the Server

Setting Search Preferences

The end-user configuration options are:

• Enabling End-User Access
• Setting Search/Browse Preferences

1. Check, uncheck, or select the options you want to change.

2. Click OK to commit the changes.

Enabling End-User Access

The primary reason you would disable end-user access is to use the Compass Server as a robot-only server in a distributed indexing environment. In such a setup, you deploy one or more robot-only servers to generate resource descriptions, then import those resource descriptions into a central Compass Server that end-users search. This can distribute the network traffic and processor loads more efficiently than running both the end-user search and the robot on the same system.

The contents of the "server not available" message come from a standard HTML page called the "No Login" file. The location of the file is listed below the checkbox that enables end-user search access. You can customize the message by editing the indicated file. You cannot change the name of the file, but you can change its contents with any HTML editor.

When you disable end-user access, the Compass Server copies the No Login file into the server's document directory. When you enable access again, the server deletes the copy of the No Login file from the document directory, leaving the master copy available for future use.

Setting Search/Browse Preferences

To choose a different search/browse template, do the following:

1. Choose a template from the pop-up menu.

2. Click OK.

3. Stop and start the server.

If your Compass Server does not have a set of categories defined (as described in Setting Up Categories), or if you don't want users accessing categories for any reason, you can choose one of the search-only templates.

Choosing a search-only template removes all reference to categories and subcategories from the search screen, including disabling the Browse Categories button.

You can also create your own search and browse templates or modify the ones provided with the server. This process is described in the Netscape Compass Server Programmer's Guide.

Generating Search Statistics

The server maintains only the most recently generated report, so you should periodically run the statistics report to update the results.

To generate search statistics, do the following:

1. Check Exclude My Compass Queries if you want to exclude queries made by the My Compass profiler when it creates its newsletters.

2. Click Generate Report.

In its default configuration, the Compass Server provides an About Compass button across the bottom of each user screen, which links to a standard "about" screen.

The contents of the about screen for the Compass Server are controlled by the HTML file called about.html in the server's document directory. You can edit the file with any standard HTML editor.

The default about.html contains an "About Compass" heading, followed by links to one or both of the following reports, if they exist:

• An ordered list of the most common terms searched for

This is the report generated by the Reports|Popular Queries option, described in Generating Search Statistics.

• A list of the sites indexed most recently

This is the report generated by the Reports|Database Analysis option, described in Checking the Database.

The default about screen also contains a link to authoring guidelines that tell document authors how the Compass Server indexes their documents.

Customizing Your About Screen

• Who is in charge of the system, and how to contact them
• What kind of sites the index targets (all internal sites, certain departments, competing companies, only public web sites, and so on)
• How often the site is updated
• How often old information is purged
• Whether the index includes only internal web sites
• What document formats are included in the index

Last Updated: 02/12/98 13:34:30