SharePoint uses iFilters to index its files. Filters for most common file types are included out of the box with most versions of SharePoint. The big notable exception is an iFilter for PDF files. This is because Adobe won’t let Microsoft redistribute any of their code. It’s so bad that Microsoft can’t even include a PDF icon with SharePoint, you have to go out, download it, and set it up yourself. This has been true since the early days of SharePoint.
One of the things that you must do when you configure SharePoint to index PDF files is that you must tell the indexer that PDF is a valid file type. That’s easy enough to do from within the Shared Service Provider (for 2007) or the Search Service Application (for 2010), but the free versions of SharePoint, WSS and SharePoint Foundation don’t come with these tools.
It has always been possible to do this with WSS with a little bit of registry editing (and it’s supported by Microsoft), but that’s no longer true with SharePoint Foundation. That hack just doesn’t work with it. So what’s the answer? Well, as it turns out, the solution isn’t just adequate, it’s quite a bit better. The solution is to Install Search Server Express 2010.
Search Server Express is pretty simply a (only slightly) scaled back version of the Search Service applications that you get when you install SharePoint Server 2010. They are virtually the same architecturally and you get many of the features that you get with Server 2010. You also get a few other SharePoint Service applications, most notably, the Secure Store Service. And if you’re a Foundation user,it aligns up with your licensing agreement because it’s free.
So essentially,you get a much better search engine, with more capability for free. I can’t see a down side here. You don’t already need Foundation installed to install SSE, so in the future, whenever called upon to install SharePoint Foundation, I’ll be going straight to Search Server Express.
Hi,
Our WSS 3.0 platform went through an in-place upgrade to WSS 4.0 and everything went fine. Well, do you think we can now upgrade to search server 2010 express ? Should be just run the SSE installation wizard on our migrated platform ?
Thanks a lot if you can help us on that
best regards
Hi Philipe
You can, I””ve done it. you””ll need to rerun the config after you do so. Also, if you have the Office web apps installed, uninstall them first.
This information is incorrect.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ronalg/archive/2011/03/14/crawling-pdfs-and-using-other-ifilters-with-sharepoint-foundation-2010.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2518465
Thanks Ron.
I haven””t tried that, but I will. Too bad that guidance only appeared recently. It is different than with WSS.
I will maintain that it””s still a better idea to simply start with Search Server Express. It”s cleaner, there”s no downside to doing so, works better with a multi server farm, and you get more capability.
I””ll post here if I get a chance to try this and confirm it.
Be careful. I just downloaded it, and then installed it. It completly took down my farm. There are a few very important .net hot patches that need to be installed, along with some other updates. After recovering, I made sure everthing was pre-installed before installing it. Much better 2nd time arround.
🙂
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