Content Indexing

Meridian Enterprise features full-text searching of vault documents and memo properties by the various Meridian client applications. This makes finding documents extremely easy and versatile. The feature uses the Windows Search service that is included with the Windows operating systems and relies on IFilters provided by Microsoft and other software companies. The IFilters are necessary to extract the readable text from the different file formats that are stored in the vault. A specific IFilter is required fore each file type that you want to be searchable in Meridian. No configuration of the Meridian clients is necessary to enable full-text searching—it is detected automatically.

If your Meridian application server uses the Windows Search service, that service detects document changes and manages the text extraction and indexing process automatically and the configuration is simpler. If your server uses the older Indexing Service, it does not perform text extraction automatically and so this must be configured separately. Meridian provides a program named AMFTFilter to perform the extraction and that can be scheduled as a Windows task to keep the content indexes up to date with the latest document changes. AMFTFilter is not necessary with the Windows Search service.

AMFTFilter stores the extracted text in XML files with the file extension .ami in a duplicate folder structure to the document content files. By default, these folders and files are located at C:\BC-Meridian Vaults\<Vault Name>\fti. These files are then indexed by the server into a specific catalog for each vault. After the initial indexing is done, the AMFTFilter program can be scheduled to run periodically to update the catalog with new or changed document text.

The following table is a checklist for confirming that the related tasks of configuring content indexing have been performed. The tasks are listed in the order in which they should be performed. Use the hyperlinks in the checklist to find the configuration information for each task. Track your progress by printing this checklist and placing a check mark in the Done column as you finish each task.

Content indexing configuration checklist

Done	Task	Topic References
	Select the Windows Search integration or the BC Indexing Search component during Meridian server installation. Only the component that is compatible with your server is available for selection.	Install the Server Components
	Confirm that the content indexing service of the operating system (Windows Search or Indexing Service) has been installed on the server and is working.	Meridian Servers
	In Windows Server Manager, temporarily stop and disable whichever service is used while you perform the IFilter configuration steps.	See the documentation for your version of Windows.
	Install any IFilters that you require.	See the documentation for the IFilter.
	In Windows Server Manager, enable and start the content indexing service that you stopped previously.	See the documentation for your version of Windows.
	Configure content indexing for each vault that requires full-text search functionality.	Configure Content Indexing
	In the Indexing Options applet of Windows Control Panel, enable indexing of the file types that require full-text search functionality.	See the documentation for your version of Windows.
	In the Indexing Options applet of Windows Control Panel, rebuild the content indexes.	See the documentation for your version of Windows.
	Restart the Meridian server.	See the documentation for your version of Windows.
	In Windows Explorer, test that the IFilters are working correctly by searching for text in one of the file types that you configured. The results of this test are the same as you can expect in Meridian Enterprise.	See the documentation for your version of Windows.
	If full-text searches do not produce results, repair the installation.	Troubleshoot Content Indexing