SharePoint 2010 and Adobe PDF

The following post is an update from the original ‘SharePoint 2007 and Adobe PDF‘ post written in 2007. These notes are based on SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 (made publicly available in November 2009). Once the product has officially launched on 12 May 2010, an update will be posted if any changes are made to the process. The process is very similar to SharePoint 2007, with minor changes to folder location (14 instead of 12) and a slightly different administration user interface in the browser.

SharePoint Server 2010, like its predecessors, includes indexing and search capabilities. But what doesn’t come out of the box is the ability to index and search for PDF documents. PDF is a format owned by Adobe, not Microsoft. If you want to be able to find Adobe PDF documents, or have the PDF icon appear when viewing PDF files in a SharePoint document library (see image above), you will need to set it up for yourself. This post describes how to.

1. Download and install Adobe’s 64-bit PDF iFilter*¹ –

             http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025
    2 .  Download the Adobe PDF icon (select Small 17 x 17)

             http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html

• Give the icon a name or accept the default: ‘pdficon_small.gif’
• Save the icon (or copy to) C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES
• Edit the DOCICON.XML file to include the PDF icon
• In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML
• Edit the DOCICON.XML file (I open it in NotePad, you can also use the built-in XML Editor)
• Ignore the section <ByProgID> and scroll down to the <ByExtension> section of the file
• Within the <ByExtension> section, insert <Mapping Key=”pdf” Value=”pdficon_small.gif” /> attribute. The easiest way is to copy an existing one – I usually just copy the line that starts <Mapping Key=”png”… and replace the parameters for Key and Value (see image below)

• Save and close the file.

1. Add PDF to the list of supported file types within SharePoint
2. In the web browser, open SharePoint Central Administration
3. Under Application Management, click on Manage service applications
4. Scroll down the list of service apps and click on Search Service Application
5. Within the Search Administration dashboard, in the sidebar on the left, click File Types
6. Click ‘New File Type’ and enter PDF in the File extension box. Click OK
7. Scroll down the list of file types and check that PDF is now listed and displaying the pdf icon.
8. Close the web browser
9. Stop and restart Internet Information Server (IIS)*² Note: this will temporarily take SharePoint offline. Open a command line (Start – Run – enter ‘cmd’) and type ‘iisreset’
10. Perform a full crawl of your index. Note: An incremental crawl is not sufficient when you have added a new file type. SharePoint only indexes file names with the extensions listed under File Types and ignores everything else. When you add a new file type, you then have to perform a full crawl to forcibly identify all files with the now relevant file extension.

That’s it. If you now perform a search, PDF files should be displayed in results where they match the search query, along with the PDF icon on display in results. The icon should also be visible in any document libraries that contain PDF files.