Specifying Online and Offline Previews

 

Supported File Types

Previews are available for the following file types:

  • MS Word:
    • Legacy documents: (binary format) 2000 and 2003
    • Office Open XML files: 2007, 2010, and 2013
  • MS Excel (2000, 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013)
  • MS PowerPoint (2000, 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013)
  • PDF
  • Email (.msg and .eml)
  • Images (.gif, .png, .jpg, .tiff, and .bmp)
  • ZIP
  • RTF
  • TXT

When to Select Online and Offline Previews

Use Offline Preview generation to generate Previews at indexing time and Online Preview generation to generate Previews at viewing time.

  • By default, both modes are enabled.

See the following table to optimize Preview usage:

Usage Online Preview
Generation		 Offline Preview
Generation
Documents that require OCR support
X
Frequently indexed documents
X
Large documents
X
Small documents, such as emails X
Text only, documents X
Minimize the amount of database space used to store Previews X

Multiple content sources: Consider specifying some sources as offline and some as online, depending on the document types that are located in the source folders.

  • For example, if you have a set of frequently accessed documents, specify the online Preview generation mode in order to increase the speed at which these documents can be accessed while minimizing the database requirements.
 X S

 

Select On/Offline Previews

By default, Online and Offline Previews are both enabled when you install Smart Previews.

You can choose to disable either or both of these types:

  1. Navigate to the machine hosting the Smart Previews Index server.
  2. Go to the Web Administration Console.
    1. The Smart Previews Web Administration Console - Central Administration page appears.


  3. Manage this Server > Control the Import Service:
    1. Click and the Service management page appears.


  4. Manage CPU usage > Choose Preview generation mode:
    1. Deselect Offline mode or Online mode.
  5. Choose CPU usage level:
    1. To boost Preview generation performance, BA Insight recommends that one Import Server have the Online Preview Generation role.
    2. You can use multiple Import Servers only with Offline Preview Generation.


  6. Click Save.