I knew about the TIFF iFilter available in Windows 2008R2 and its OCR capabilities, but I had not had the time to try it out until very recently when it became a priority as a customer requested it.

 

The setup for it is very SIMPLE and well described in John Liu's blog post. It consists of no more than two essential steps: activating the TIFF iFilter Windows Feature and to configure the OCR Group Policy properties.

 

I might want to add a couple of things to John's description though:

 

1) You should also configure the option "Select OCR languages from a code page".

 

2) You do NOT need to restart your server: simply restart the SharePoint Search services and then execute an iisreset.

 

3) You only need to start a "Full Crawl" if you want to reindex TIFF files that are already in SharePoint. All TIFF files uploaded AFTER the iisreset will be indexed automatically.

 

Of course you need to consider the amount of text being added to the general search index file. However, the upside of searching on all the scanned documents' text is certainly quite obvious.