We have thousands of PDF forms that are filled out and provided to customers, then retained. (A PDF form is one with text boxes, check boxes, dropdown lists, etc. that the user enters information into. Sorry if that sounds obvious.) Most of the time, there is a label next to the field indicating it's contents.
We are making the move from Google (WorkSpace) Drive to SharePoint and have discovered that SharePoint does not index the field values. e.g. a form has been saved where the Employer field says Microsoft. On Google Drive, searching on Microsoft will return the document, as well as any others that contain the word. However, on SharePoint, searching on Microsoft will not return the matching document. Searching on the word 'Employer' (the form label) will return the document, as well as every other form, so I know that the contents are being indexed. The indexing just doesn't include the field values. This is not an image issue, or anything along those lines. These field values are data that continues to be editable.
I asked O365 support about this issue, and was informed that this is simply not a feature of SharePoint... I find this a little hard to believe, especially because I can only find one other person who has encountered the issue, but I would assume PDF forms are not so rare.
Can anyone confirm that SharePoint does not support PDF form content search? Does anyone have a workaround for this, either within SharePoint or by some manipulation of the PDFs prior to saving to SharePoint? Any help would be appreciated.
Frank
