MOSS Central Admin / SSP does not open link

MOSS installation though is a very simple installation, some times can lead to lot of headaches.Recenlty on one of the fresh single server installations, the SSP simply refuses to open any link within the SSP page.or the central admin. After a full investigation, i found the reason to be very silly and had nothing to do with the installation. The solutions?
I simply added the site to the trusted sites in IE. And presto, the site is fully working.The Javascripts were being blocked by the IE that prevents the page from opening.

A lot of research for a simple problem. Such is usually the problem.

Search PDF files in MOSS

Search is one of the powerful features of MOSS Portal. It allows the user to retrieve data seamlessly showing the right data to the right people. The Search also spreads its wings to all the office suite. Many a times the office documents are stored as PDF files and are uploaded to Portal.

Adobe has also provided filters that will enable searching the PDF files. the below steps describes the process to index within PDF files

Getting Adobe IFilter 9 to work with SharePoint

Download the Adobe IFilter. If you are using the Adobe 8, then you will need to download this from the adobe site. If you are using version 9.0, the IFilter is already installed on the machine.

Enable the PDF File Indexing

• Download Adobe Reader 9.0, which includes IFilter 9.x.x.x, from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/
• Download the Acrobat PDF Picture. This will be used to display the pdf file icon. http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html
• Add the PDF file type to the Extensions List for WSS search by editing the registry
  • Start regedit
  • Open the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Applications\{Random GUID}\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList
  • Add PDF to the list as a new String Value. Use a new high value e.g. if 37 is the highest value, use "38" as the key with the value "pdf"
• Add the Acrobat PDF picture to the SharePoint templates directory. Copy the Acrobat PDF picture called pdficon_small.gif in the 12 Hive\TEMPLATE\IMAGES folder, e.g. %programfiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES.
• Bind the Acrobat PDF picture to the PDF file type
  • Open the 12 Hive\TEMPLATE\XML\DOCICON.XML file
  • Find the part
  • Add the following mapping:
    
• Set IFilter mapping in registry
  • Start regedit
  • Open the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\
  • Add (or modify) the .pdf key
  • Add a Multi-String value with value {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603} or modify if another GUID value already exists.
  • Open the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\
  • Add (or modify) the .pdf key
  • Add a Multi-String value with value {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603} or modify if another GUID value already exists.
• Add the Adobe Reader folder to the environment path variable
  • Right Click on My Computer
  • Open Properties
  • Open the Advanced tab
  • Go to the Environment variables
  • Edit the Path variable
  • Add your Reader folder to the Path list, e.g. C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader
• Restart the Search service by restarting your server or executing the following commands:
  • Run: net stop osearch
  • Run: net start osearch
• Crawl the PDF documents
  • Existing PDF documents that were crawled before the Adobe PDF IFilter has been installed are not indexed during an incremental crawl. You have to edit each existing PDF file to trigger the crawler to reindex the file during an incremental crawl. It´s easier to run a full crawl after you have installed the Adobe PDF IFilter.

With this, the MOSS crawlers will crawl the content of the PDF files also, enabling the users to retrieve data from the  PDF files also

Display PDF File in MOSS Portal

Steps to display PDF file in a MOSS / Sharepoint Portal
Usually, when i get down to write a blog, i tend to get creative and put a lot of language around it. This time, i am going to cut the crap and get straight to it.
I want to display a PDF file in my MOSS Portal. So how do i go about it?
Following are some simple approach that your dev team can take.
1. Upload the pdf to a doc library
Add a Content Editor Web part to your web site
Copy paste the below code to the HTML mode in the content editor
< embed height=”500px” width=”500px”
src=”http://siteurl/test.pdf” type=”application/pdf”>
2. Use a simple page viewer web part and give the path of the pdf file in the document library
3. Many a case, the user will want to dynamically pick the pdf file based on some parameter. This was my case too. A simple web part will do the trick for this. Create a custom web part that spins out the HTML mentioned in approach 1. With a difference that the url of the pdf file will be generated at the run time based the business requirement.