Saturday, May 30, 2009

Start index Office 2007 files in Exchange 2007

Do you want your Exchange server content index to understand Office 2007 file format?

Default installation of Exchange 2007 don't understand how to index office 2007 file format such as .docx files.

This can be discovered by doing a search from outlook in online mode or from OWA for words that you know is in the .docs file. If the search don’t find anything you must enable Exchange to understand office 2007 file format.

This is not difficult. start by download and install the Office 2007 filterpack. Installation is safe and do not stop any services or trigger a reboot.
After installation you must register the new iFilters in order for the Exchange content index engine to use them. This is done by editing the registry so be careful, How to register Filter Pack IFilters with Exchange Server 2007

When you have followed the article and imported the .reg file and restarted services you can try to send a e-mail with a .docx file attached and then search for some words that you know is in the word file. If everything is OK your search should find your word file.

But if your server already contain office 2007 files?
Then you can rebuild your search index on Exchange. This is easy to do. Stop some services, delete the index files and then start services again. To make this easier there is a powershell script that does exactly that. The default location is in the “C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Scripts” folder and ahs the name “ResetSearchIndex.ps1

Script takes several parameters, but if you want to rebuild index for every database you can run “.\ResetSearchIndex.ps1 -force –all”.

A word of caution when you rebuild your indexes. This will cause your server to run as fast as it’s resources allow it to and this will for sure make the disks spin like crazy and CPU utilization go up a lot. This will make your user experience bad. So the suggestion is to rebuild the indexes outside business hours.

happy searching !

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