Monday, September 05, 2005

Harnessing properties in SharePoint Search - Feedback

Patrick pointed to an article from Robert Bogue on Intranet Journal - Harnessing properties in SharePoint Search. This is definitely a must read for SharePoint developers...

There is however something he talks about which is not correct:
...But this also means that non-Office documents don't share the same relationship between fields in the document library and the properties of the document itself. So if you're trying to develop a searching mechanism for documents like TIF documents or PDFs, you'll find that setting up a meta data field for those document libraries won't allow you to search for those documents directly via their properties. You'll still be able to organize the information...

There first sentence is true, property demotion only works with Office. But then there is a mistake, you can still search by property even when the document is not an Office format - property demotion does not affect your ability to search a document based on the metadata assigned to it in a document library. I tried it with SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with Adobe IFilter 6.0 installed and it worked...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's not incorrect, just inprecise... It's intended to indicate that the property won't appear in the properties from crawled documents and therefore it can't be searched for exclusive of all other text. It is still indexed via the moreinfo.aspx page.

jopx said...

But it can be searched for exclusive of all other text...