Alexander’s Blog

Unlike Office icons (Word, Excel, etc.), by default, PDF icons are not displayed on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 sites when you add a PDF document. Also, you cannot search the contents of a PDF file and the search results do not display PDF icons. For Windows Server 2003 (32- and 64-bit) there are some KB articles and other documentation that shows you exactly how to display a PDF icon. I couldn’t find any documentation for 64-bit Windows Server 2008 and wasn’t able to get the icon to display using the Windows Server 2003 (x64) instructions from Microsoft. I tried Microsoft blogs, KB articles, and other Web sites but the instructions for Windows Server 2003 didn’t work for my Windows Server 2008. If you are able to get them to work that’s great. If not, read on.

Recently I discovered that Adobe finally came out with a new Adobe iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms which allows searching PDF files on 64-bit Windows platforms for MOSS 2007, Exchange 2007, and SQL Server 2005. I tried this new iFilter and was able to get it to work. I decided to document these instructions for people who may be running MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008.

By the way, Adobe has tested their iFilter 9 on the following systems:

Desktop environment
• Microsoft Windows XP x64 with Service Pack 2: Windows Desktop Search 3 and 4, Windows Indexing Service
• Microsoft Windows Vista x64 with Service Pack 1: Windows Search 4

Server environment
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition R2 with Service Pack 2: SharePoint Server 2007, Exchange Server 2007, Windows Desktop Search 3
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x64 with Service Pack 1: SharePoint Server 2007, SQL Server 2005, Windows Search 4

Installation

Adobe has not tested the iFilter on MOSS 2007 running on Windows Server 2008. I am not sure why they didn’t bother testing on MOSS 2007 but I did and it works. Here are the step-by-step instructions on how to install the iFilter 9 and configure MOSS.

1. Download the Adobe iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms.

2. Unzip the PDFiFilter64installer.zip file.

3. Logon with an administrator account and double-click the PDFFilter64installer.msi to start the installation.

4. After the installation is complete, add the location of the iFilter installation to your path in the environment variables (Control Panel\System\Advanced\Environment Variables).

5. Follow the instructions in this file written by Adobe: Configuring Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms for MS SharePoint 2007.

6. When you get to Step 6 of instructions in the above file, you will notice that the instructions ask you to add an entry in the DOCICON.XML file for the PDF icon by adding the text:

<Mapping Key=”pdf” Value=”pdf.gif”>

WARNING! There is a missing forward slash in Adobe’s instructions which you need to watch out for. There should be a forward slash at the end so the correct syntax should be:

<Mapping Key=”pdf” Value=”pdf.gif”/>

If you are using a different file name for the GIF file, make sure that you replace “pdf.gif” with the name of your file. Notice that the entry needs to be added to the <ByExtension> section of the DOCICON.XML file.

7. At this point you should be able to see the PDF icon next to Adobe PDF files and the search results should display content from PDF documents along with a PDF icon.

Troubleshooting Tips

1. Make sure that you restart the search service (net stop osearch, net start osearch) and IISRESET when you are done making the changes.

2. Depending on the order of changes you made, you may have to start a full crawl to index all the files.

3. Look for any typos in the entry you made in the DOCICON.XML file. Also, make sure that the entry was made in the correct section. This is one of the most common reason for failures.

4. The icon that can be downloaded from Adobe’s Web site is 17×17 pixels. I read somewhere that the icon must be 8-bit and 16×16 pixels. I haven’t spent time to verify this (although I know others have used it on Windows Server 2003 32-bit and it worked for them) but when I couldn’t get mine to work I replaced my 17×17 icon with a 16×16 PDF icon. You can download it here. In my case there could be other reasons for the lack of icon display but if you can’t get your PDF icon to display you might want to try using this 16×16 pixel icon.

5. Make sure that the name of the icon file matches with the entry in the DOCICON.XML file. For example, if your icon file is called PDF16, make sure you use the same name (PDF16.GIF) in the DOCICON.XML file.

6. Whenever you make changes to the DOCICON.XML file, you need to run IISRESET at the command prompt. Refresh your browser to see the effect of the changes.