Here’s an interesting tidbit that I recently found useful… I had to include a collection of new file types in SharePoint 2007 search results. The files were of extension *.m but where simple text files. We wanted to include the files in the crawl AND perform a full-text crawl on the content. These are separate challenges; the first is simple, the second proved to be a little trickier. Basically, we need to “trick” (er, “teach”) SharePoint to treat these *.m files as text files and leverage the native ifilter to perform the full-text crawl.
I was able to leverage the details from this blog post. The good news is that everything worked perfectly. The bad news, to me, is that it requires a server level change… and that complicates disaster recovery. So, if you find these instructions useful, as I did, make sure you include the registry modification in your SharePoint documentation!