How can I get draft documents in a document library to be crawled by search?

Question

Background for My Issue:

I'm working on a document library, with major and minor versioning enabled. For the draft items, the client requires that only users who have permission to edit items in the document library are able to see the minor versions, so I have selected the appropriate option inside the Versioning Settings. There is no content approval required for publishing a major version. I also have SharePoint Search (non-Foundation) installed and configured.

The Issue:

My problem is, that none of the documents that have the draft status are being crawled, and so can't be searched. I gave the Default Content Access Account Contribute privileges on the document library, but when I ran a full crawl after that, the draft documents are still not showing up in the Crawl Log, and still do not appear in the search results. I have logged in as the Default Content Access Account, and I am able to both view and open the draft documents, so the Crawl Account should be able to crawl those documents.

I have seen in other posts people reporting that if they enabled the "Any user who can read items" option for the Document Library Versioning settings, then performed a full crawl, the draft documents were then indexed and available for search. However, this is not an acceptable option, as the client wants draft documents to only be visible to the Contributors of the document library.

My Question:

Is there any way to crawl a document library to include draft documents, without having to open up those draft documents to "Any user who can read items"?

Answer 1

The 'Contribute' level of permission still does not have permission to see minor versions. You would have to grant the crawl account at least 'Approve' permissions for this.

However, if a document has not been given any version yet then only the document creator can see it. If you want those documents to appear in search then the crawl account will need even higher permissions. This would either mean giving it "Full Control" or possibly even making it a Site Collection Administrator - neither of which is recommended.