How to enable indexing of Office Document keywords in MOSS / SharePoint

This one cost me a couple of days the first time round and then a couple of hours a month later because I'd forgotten the solution. Think I'd better write this down.

The problem:

I was bemused to find that, out of the box, SharePoint was not returning results on a search based on specified keywords. I'd checked that there were documents that contained the keywords I was searching for and also made sure that the documents were showing up at all in search. In fact, documents were showing up for all Word metadata fields other than Keywords. It seems to me that, of any of the fields, Keywords would be the one that should be indexed. Well this was not the case.

I tried a variety of things and very nearly gave up but eventually cracked it.

The solution:

I'm not going to go into why this works, I'm just going to give you the steps:

Go to the SSP admin site
Go to Metadata Properties in Search Administration
Find the Property Name “DocKeywords”
Click on Office:5(Text) which should appear in the same row
Tick “Include values for this property in the search index”
Click OK
I think a full index will need to run before documents begin to show up

That's it, or at least I think that's it. I tried so many things before these steps that I can't be sure it wasn't a combination of things. All I know is that if I untick that box and reindex it stops working. So I'm fairly confident this is the key. Happy days.

Posted by Fuse on 24 Jun 2009

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About the author

Fuse

Fuse is a Microsoft Partner, based in Northampton. We help organisations of all sizes to maximise IT efficiencies through the use of Microsoft cloud computing solutions.