I found conflicting information regarding compatibility between Search Server Express (SSE) and SharePoint Foundation when I started looking online. Some said SSE couldn’t be installed on a server that already had SharePoint Foundation (SPF) running. It also was rumored that pdf iFilters couldn’t be installed on SSE or SPF.
I hope this post clarifies some of these misconceptions, rumors, and general confusion.
What I Found
Quick Facts
(I hope I get ’em right, I don’t want to continue spreading confusion)
- Search Server Express CAN be installed on top of an existing SPF install
- PDF iFilters CAN be installed on SSE
- iFilters CANNOT be installed on SPF alone
- Installing SSE on a clean server DOES include SPF
More Info
You can find steps to Install Search Server 2010 Express which can be followed to install on a SharePoint Foundation 2010 server. The only critical changes are:
- You must select the Server Farm installation (otherwise the SSE will try installing SPF)
- Do not select “Create a new server farm” after the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard completes, and do not use the wizard to setup/configure your farm – Cancel to manually configure the farm.
After you have completed the installation you will have to configure search manually by following the Post-installation steps for Search Server 2010. That isn’t ideal, but those steps are close enough that you should be able to work your way through successfully.
Final Steps – PDF iFilter
In addition to setting up the iFilters as described in a previous post about SharePoint 2010 PDF iFilters, I had to make the following registry change before I could get Search Server Express to return results that included PDF files.
- Start, Run… regedit
- Navigate to the following location:
- \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension
- Right-click Extension, a menu will appear.
- Click New–> Key to create a new key for .pdf (enter “.pdf” and Save, be sure to enter the dot)
- Click your new .pdf key, then right-click and Modify the Default (Name (Default) Type REG_SZ)
- Add {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603} as the Default Value, click OK
- You may also have to restart the SharePoint Server Search 14 service (I did)
- Start a Full Crawl to ensure your content is indexed now that the iFilter is configured