Spotlight Win equivalent

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This seems an odd thing to be asking here, but it is where the people who most probably know are most likely to hang out, so here goes:

I have two Mac laptops, an iMac at home and a Mac Mini connected to our office network. The rest of the office network has Windows XP workstations and they are all linked to a data centre based Linux server.

We have a huge number of scanned documents that have to be manually merged with client files which takes our staff a lot of time and puts a great deal of pressure on them.

Many of the documents that are scanned don't actually need to be merged but do need to be available on line. I have found that scanning them as searchable PDF's on the Mac Mini and finding them with Spotlight works rather well.

The next step is to make them available on the network. Sharing the scan folder is easy enough - but how to make the search function available to the Windows computers? Remember this is being used by individuals with minimal computer literacy. Is there anything for Windows that approaches Spotlight used at its most simple level but with the same effectiveness?
 

eric


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I can't imagine that windows 'search' in explorer wouldn't work. It may not be as fancy as Spotlight, but the fuctionality is similar.

Have you had anyone try it?
 
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John F
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Explorer Search is p-a-i-n-f-u-l-l-y slow. With large numbers of searchable PDF's to handle, Spotlight accomplishes in seconds what IE Search does in minutes.
 
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John F
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Since the posts above, we have found that the Google Desktop function works just fine, and once indexed, as fast as Spotlight.

BTW since then we have also changed all our desktop computers to Macs, but the Windows addicts insist they be dual boot and default to Windows - Aaaaaaaagh!!


John F
 

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