Bill Gates’ Last Day at Microsoft

Excellent spoof video from the Consumer Electronics Show Keynote -

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20080107/bill-gates-last-day-microsoft-video/

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Bill Gates

Office 2003 SP3 and Blocked File Types

A quick note on this in case you have installed Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, or are planning to.  This update will block access to a fair few legacy file types, such as Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro, Word documents earlier than 6.0, and several more.  I do know of some organisations that need to retain files in these earlier formats for legal or compliance reasons, so it’s worth bearing in mind that after installing SP3 they will be blocked by Office applications “for security reasons”. 

You can find more information, and a registry hack workaround here.

Technorati tags: office 2003, sp3

Configure PDF IFilter in WSS 3.0

There are various posts around on setting up MOSS 2007 to use the PDF IFilter, and some stuff on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 as well.  I’ve found a method which works for me, so I wanted to put this together in one place – not least of all so I can find it when out on site with a client. 

Out of the box neither WSS 3 nor MOSS 2007 will index content located in Acrobat PDF files, so you need to set up the IFilter.  I’ve also found that that PDF files loaded prior to the installation of the filter won’t be re-crawled automatically, so to be on the safe side you might want to kick off a full crawl.

Here is what I’ve found works for WSS 3.0:

1. First, you need to download the Adobe PDF IFilter 6.0, which you can find at this URL.  You should also get hold of a suitable Icon to use with PDFs, so that when they are listed in a document library they are easily recognisable.  There is a 17 x 17 one available on the Adobe web site here.
2. Once you’ve downloaded the IFilter, install it on your WSS 3.0 server, and then follow the instructions on registry settings in Microsoft KB Article 927675.  I’ve always found that providing the Adobe IFilter installed properly, the only setting I need to add is the Search Extensions one listed in step 2.  Also note step 5 re stopping and re-starting the search service.
3. Now you need to set up the Icon file.  If you downloaded the icon file in step 1 above, you will have a file called pdficon_small.gif.  You need to copy this onto your WSS 3.0 server, into drive:\Program Files\Common FIles\Microsoft Shared\Web Server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES.
4. Next you need to edit the XML file which WSS uses to link file extensions to icons.  This file is called DOCICON.XML and is located at drive:\Program Files\Common FIles\Microsoft Shared\Web Server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML.  Navigate to that folder and locate the file.  I would suggest making a backup copy first, then opening the file in NotePad.  You need to add a mapping key for PDFs at the bottom of the file, above the </ByExtension> closing tag.  The new key will be <Mapping Key=”pdf” Value=”pdficon_small.gif” OpenControl=”"/>  (note that XML is case sensitive so make sure you use same case as previous entries).  Then save the file.
5. That’s pretty much it, but if you already have PDFs uploaded to your WSS server I would recommend starting a full crawl.  You can do the with STSAdm, the command syntax is Stsadm -o spsearch -action fullcrawlstart .  More on this on TechNet here.

Technorati tags: SharePoint, PDF, IFilter