IFilter for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Windows Desktop Search

Search for information is a vital part of any office workflow. As the organization grows, documents scatter across departments, file folders and ECM system, and search takes more and more of the valuable time. Microsoft® offers effective instruments to organize enterprise search on different levels, from centralized content storages to individual desktops. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server has powerful capabilities to search in SharePoint libraries and folders; Windows Desktop Search is helpful in finding files on desktop computers.

However, SharePoint Server and Windows Desktop Search only index contents of files in certain document formats like HTML, RTF, DOC, and XLS. Information contained in image files, such as JPEGs, or highly popular PDFs and TIFFs, remains undiscovered. This means that the contents of scanned documents, faxes, letters, and contracts is invisible to the server, and these documents may not be displayed in search results.

ABBYY FineReader Server with its IFilter component extends Microsoft search capabilities over image documents. It “unlocks” the content of image files by means of OCR and makes it available for indexing by SharePoint Server and Windows Desktop Search. With ABBYY FineReader Server 14 IFilter, the document search in the organization becomes truly encompassing.

ABBYY FineReader Server is integrated with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Windows Desktop Search as described below:

  1. ABBYY FineReader Server is installed on a server computer (which may be separate from the SharePoint hosting machine). A special component, ABBYY FineReader Server 14 IFilter, is installed on top of the SharePoint Server and/or user desktops to provide communication between the search system and the FineReader Server. The IFilter is a light component which consumes almost no computer resources to make sure it host's performance remains on high level.
  2. Each ABBYY IFilter receives image documents from the corresponding SharePoint or Windows Desktop search crawler and passes them to the FineReader Server.
  3. ABBYY FineReader Server in the background performs high-quality OCR on the images and sends the recognized text back to the IFilter.
  4. Microsoft search engine accepts the document contents from ABBYY IFilter and builds an index. The image then becomes discoverable via full-text search.

With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server:

With Windows Desktop Search:

See also

ABBYY FineReader Server Architecture

Setting Up Microsoft Search IFilter

IFilter Workflow Properties Dialog Box

3/26/2024 1:49:49 PM

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