We have a remote desktop farm built on 2012 R2. Due to our users having to run Outlook in cached mode, we have not installed the windows search service on these session hosts as it breaks the Outlook search without additional configuration.
The users store all of their data on a mapped drive, which points to a share on a 2012 R2 file server.
What is the minimum configuration required to allow users to search based on file contents, in this remote share? The option to search file contents is greyed out, which I assume is because of the missing search service on the session host?
Is there anything that can be configured on the file server side to index there, and when searching, use the remote index to return results?
The option you mentioned is directly related to the windows search service. It is greyed out when it's not installed.
Try using "Content:" or the corresponding word in your servers language in the search field, it will still find files with specific text content, although without indexing it might take some time.
Sorry for necromancing, but unanswered posts that appear on google are not very helpful.