Windows Search and Exchange

Previous recent posts have addressed the new update to Microsoft's so-called "desktop" search engine, Windows Search 4.0. One of the comments that one sees frequently on newsgroups and blogs is that a desktop-oriented search engine, which typically creates a local index on the user's workstation, can hammer an Exchange server if many users start indexing their mailboxes more or less simultaneously.

Windows Search 4.0 is first and foremost a local search product that is oriented towards helping users find stuff on their own workstation. If a user is running e-mail in "cached" mode, then the indexer runs against the local copy of the e-mail store, and central e-mail servers are unaffected. However, if a user is running in "online" mode, then their search engine will run against the central store, and you have the potential for excessive Exchange Server overhead.

You might like to know that among the many Group Policy settings that Microsoft provided in Windows Search 4.0 is a setting ("Enable throttling online mailboxes") that allows you to limit the indexing of online e-mails on an items-per-minute basis, so that you don't kill your servers. I continue to be impressed by the level of Group Policy support built into Windows Search 4.0.

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