HOW TO: Configure Full-Text Indexing on Public Folders (319433)


The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server
This article was previously published under Q319433

IN THIS TASK

SUMMARY

Public folders can be very useful as repositories of messages, conversations and documents, and for hosting internal or Internet newsgroups. However, the nature of public folders may make them unstructured and therefore difficult to search, particularly for key words that occur in the body of a message or post. Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 can index the full text of any post to a public folder so that you can rapidly and efficiently search for any word or phrase.

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Requirements

The following lists describe the recommended hardware, software, network infrastructure, skills and knowledge, and service packs that you must have to configure Full-Text Indexing.
  • Windows 2000 Server with Service Pack 2 installed
  • Active Directory
  • Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 with Service Pack 1
  • Microsoft Outlook 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2000, or Microsoft Outlook 98 with the Quick Fix Engineering patch
Prior Knowledge required:
  • Ability to use the Exchange 2000 Administrator console
  • Understanding of Indexing issues, such as noise words, catalog (corpus) and incremental and full populations
When you configure full-text indexing, you must go through the following stages:
  1. Set system resource usage
  2. Create a full-text index
  3. Populate the index
  4. Check the index state
  5. Configure indexes and allow searches
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Set System Resource Usage

Before you start the indexing process, you must configure the system resources that indexing can consume. This changes the priority level of the indexing process to increase or reduce preemption by other processes that may be running on the server.
  1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Microsoft Exchange, and then click System Manager.
  2. In the left pane of Exchange System Manager, double-click the Servers icon.
  3. Right-click the server that hosts the storage group that contains the public folder store that you want to configure, click Properties, and then click the Full-Text Indexing tab.
  4. Under System resource usage, click to select Minimum, Low, High or Maximum, according to the priority that you set on the indexing process (the default setting is Low).
  5. Click OK.
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Create the Full-Text Index

To create a full-text index on public folders, you must select the relevant public folder store that contains the folders that you want to index. For Outlook clients, this is the public folder store that is linked to the Public Folders object under Folders in Exchange System Manager.

To create the full-text index, follow these steps:
  1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Microsoft Exchange, and then click System Manager.
  2. In the left pane of Exchange System Manager, double-click the Servers icon.
  3. Select the server that hosts the storage group that contains the public folder store that you want to configure.
  4. Expand Storage Group Name (the default storage group name is First Storage Group), and then click Public Folder Store (ServerName).
  5. Right-click Create Full-Text Index.
  6. In the Public Folder Store (ServerName) dialog box, verify that the default path for the catalog is:
       C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\ExchangeServer_SERVERNAME\Projects
  7. Either click OK to accept this location or type another path, and then click OK (the server then creates the catalog).
  8. After processing is complete, you can expand the Full-Text Indexing object under Public Folder Store to see six entries. Note that Index State should state There is no full-text index for this store, and Last Build Time should state This catalog was never built.
You are now ready to populate the index.

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Populate the Index

When you populate the index you start the indexing process, which produces a list of the words in the Public Folder database. This list is cross-referenced to the messages in which those words exist.

To populate the index, follow these steps:
  1. Right-click the Public Folder Store object, and then click Start Full Population.NOTE: A message box opens to tell you that that this can take some time. Therefore, populating indexes is typically performed when the Exchange 2000 server is not experiencing heavy use.

  2. When you are prompted whether you want to continue, click Yes to start the population process (you will see activity on the Exchange 2000 server while the index is created).
After the activity on the Exchange 2000 server has stopped (which may take more than an hour, depending on the number of documents processed and the level of processing assigned to the indexing service), the new indexing statistics are displayed.

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Check the Index State

To check the state of the index, follow these steps:
  1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Microsoft Exchange, and then click System Manager.
  2. In the left pane of Exchange System Manager, double-click the Servers icon.
  3. Select the server that hosts the storage group that contains the relevant public folder store.
  4. Expand Storage Group Name (the default storage group name is First Storage Group), and then click Public Folder Store (ServerName).
  5. Under Public Folder Store (ServerName), click the Full-Text Indexing object to verify that Index State is set to Idle and that Number of Documents Indexed and Index Size (MB) both display values.
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Configure Indexing and Allow Searches

You can now configure when you want an update to the index and when you want a full rebuild. You can also specify whether the index is available for clients to search.

To do so, follow these steps:
  1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Microsoft Exchange, and then click System Manager.
  2. In the left pane of Exchange System Manager, double-click the Servers icon.
  3. Select the server that hosts the storage group that contains the relevant public folder store that you want to configure.
  4. Expand Storage Group Name (the default storage group name is First Storage Group), right-click Public Folder Store (ServerName), click Properties, and then click the Full-Text Indexing tab.
  5. Under the Update Interval option, either click the list box, and then click a time that you want an incremental update, or click Customize.
  6. When you click Customize, the Schedule dialog box opens and you can select which times that you want to update the index in one of two ways:
    • Click a day in the left column, and then click a time in the top row.

      -or-
    • Click and hold the mouse button as you sweep across the time slots.
    NOTE: You can choose to display the update interval either in 1-hour slots or in 15-minute slots by selecting the relevant option under Detail View.

  7. After you have selected the indexing times, click OK.
  8. Repeat steps 5 through 7 to configure the Rebuild interval (note that the default option in the list is to run a full rebuild only one time a week).
  9. Click to select This index is currently available for searching by clients.NOTE: If you do not select this option, full-text searches will not be performed against this index.

  10. Click OK to accept the configuration changes and close the Public Folder Store (ServerName) Properties dialog box.
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Verify that the Index Works

The Index State statistics shown in the "Check the Index State" section of this article verify that indexing was successful. However, you can also verify from the perspective of users.

To do so, follow these steps:
  1. Right-click a public folder in Outlook, and then click Advanced Find.
  2. In the Search for the word(s) field, type a non-noise word that you want to find, and then select an option from the In the option for subject field and message body list.
  3. Click Find Now to see messages that contain the requested word in the list box at the bottom of the window.
NOTE: For this type of verification to work, you must have performed an incremental or full population of the index after the relevant messages were added to the public folder. Also, noise words like "the" and "or" are excluded from the catalog because they are too common to be useful as search terms.

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Troubleshooting

The most common error that people make when they implement indexing is that they forget to specify that the index be available for searches that are performed by clients. Outlook does not use the full-text index unless this option is checked.

When you test the index function, it is easy to add a new message, and then to try to search for words in that message before you repopulate the index. For this type of test, use the procedure in the "Populate the Index" section of this article and select Start Incremental Population instead of Start Full Population in step 5.

Be aware of the effects that can occur when you allocate system resources for rebuilding indexes. If you select a lower system resource usage, it does not mean that the server will be less busy while it repopulates the index. Instead, a lower system resource usage means that it will be easier for other tasks to preempt the repopulation process. If processor resources on the server are not being used, regenerating the index will use all those resources, even though System Resource Usage is set to Minimum.

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REFERENCES

For more information about how to configure full-text indexing in Exchange 2000, see the Exchange 2000 Server Resource Kit and Exchange 2000 Server Help, or visit the following Microsoft Web site:

Best Practices for Deploying Full-Text Indexing White Paper

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Modification Type:MinorLast Reviewed:4/25/2005
Keywords:kbhowto kbHOWTOmaster KB319433 kbAudITPro
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