Our office has a Samba file server for all our office files. Many users access this and we store all of our relevant company documents on it.
What's annoying is we don't have any good search system for it. I can, of course, search by file name, but that's not really helpful if I'm looking for all documents that mention Yoyodyne in the year 2021, for example, unless they have that word in the filename. I would like to be able to do a search like "yoyodyne year:2021". That would be fantastic.
I've looked around at the options for this. Windows users should use a protocol called Windows Search Protocol (MS-WSP) to do this. There is an old thread on samba.org about this but no updates of working code.
Meanwhile there are various open source or sort of open source search engines out there, like Elastic Search, Apache Lucene and Slr, which seem like they are already able to parse documents of various types (PDFs, ODFs etc), index them, and answer queries about them. But no clear way to hook that into Samba.
For Linux desktop clients, I know I can run things like Recoll, Baloo (KDE only) and Beagle (no longer active). But those will require running indexing on every single desktop, when it really should be one index on the server. It's reasonable to want both Windows and Linux users to get similar results. (I realize that user permissions are connected as well, so some users will not get some search results that other users would get.)
Any solutions or guidance on this, or is this just one of those "that's how it is until it changes" situations?