SharePoint Services 2.0 And PDF Filters

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Enabling SharePoint Services 2.0 to search PDF Files
 
There are some technological problems that take longer to resolve than others but in the end there is always an answer. Over the last couple of weeks I have been using Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 and finding out about is many useful features. A business problem required a client of ours to be able to organise and manage a large number of documents which will be a mixture of Microsoft Office documents and Adobe Acrobat files. The cient needs to be able to search for content within these files which I knew was available as Sharepoint functionality but encountered the ‘No items were found matching your query’ when I began searching through the PDF documents.
 
I spent several hours trawling the net looking for an answer. I found several solutions, mostly applicable to WSS 3.0 or Sharepoint 2007 but non that applied to my scenario. I then came across a document from the Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 IT Documentation called Upgrade Considerations which shed light onto my problem. As part of the installation of the SBS Server I had upgraded the database used by WSS from the WMSDE to the full version of SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition which is supplied with SBS 2003 R2 Premium Edition. This enabled WSS to use the document indexing functionality provided by SQL Servers Full-Text Indexing service (MSFTESQL). In the section called Considerations for Upgrading from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 there is a sub-section of Warning Descriptions detailing issues and work arounds following the upgrade. The problem was that the Full-Text Search Engine does not load third party components by default i.e. PDF’s. In order to enable the instance of MSFTESQL to load the third party filters you need to run the following commands against your Sharepoint instance;
sp_fulltext_service ‘load_os_resources’, 1
sp_fulltext_service ‘verify_signature’, 0
Once you have done that you need to rebuild your indexes by doing one of the following;
  1. Run the following command against your SQL Server SharePoint instance – EXEC sp_fulltext_catalog ‘ix_<fulltextCatalogName>’, ‘rebuild’
  2. Open SQL Server Management Studio for the SharePoint instance and expand the SQL Server SharePoint database. Under the Storage folder, expand the Full-Text Catalogs folder and then right-click the catalog and select ‘Rebuild’. Click ‘OK’ when the confirmation dialog box appears to start the rebuild.

This will enable you to search the content of existing and new PDF files within WSS 2.0. Information on upgrade the SharePoint database from WMSDE to the WorkGroup Edition of SQL Server can be found on SBS installation DVD under <dvd-drive>:PREMTECHSQLINSTALLSTEPS.HTM or here.

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