For several years, Sharepoint 64 bit installations have faced a challenge in dealing with Adobe Acrobat PDF files. [Apart from having to manually tweak the XML files to add the icon...] Microsoft's search technologies, out of the box, understand the structure of their own Office documents. This means they can index the contents of these documents to provide full text searching. However, for third party products, especially Adobe Acrobat, they rely on third party providers to provide "iFilters".
What are iFilters? They are simple extensions that allow a search indexer to crawl the contents of a file. Although Adobe has always bundled the 32 bit version of its PDF iFilter with Acrobat and Acrobat Reader, they didn't provide a 64 bit version. Without this, indexing had to be relegated to 32 bit platforms.
Enter FoxIT Software. Fox (along with other companies) sells a 64 bit iFilter for Acrobat PDF files. As a result, FoxIT became a dominant iFilter for companies needing 64 bit Sharepoint indexing.
After several years in development, Adobe has finally released the 64 bit version of their iFilter for Acrobat PDF files:
iFilters provide support for full text indexing based on the contents of the file. At this time, the iFilter is not bundled with Reader (as it is for the 32 bit platforms), nor is it available for Itanium 64 bit (IA64) systems.
So why pay for what Adobe gives away? In short, performance. Adobe's 32 bit filters ran more slowly than FoxIT, and that performance gap has extended to the 64 bit architecture. It's also telling that Microsoft uses the Fox tools to index PDFs for its hosted Exchange solutions.
My sense is that for users with small volumes (<500) of PDF files, the difference in index speed will be immaterial. However, for other users -- especially medium to large Sharepoint farms with dedicated indexing servers -- the performance gains from the third party tools will be significant.
It works!
Posted by: Chris | 07/09/2009 at 12:59 PM