Crawling MS Exchange Content - public and private

I have used the MS Exchange content source to crawl both public folders and private mailboxes and folders.

Here is what I found out: It works great accept the search results are security constrained to the crawling account. Only the account that was used to crawl the folders has permissions to search for those items. This means that you have to make your public folders be truly public by allowing anonymous access which means a security hole on your exchange server to get this working. It also does not crawl more than one sub folder deep. So if you have a multilevel folder structure you will have to add them one by one to the sources. NOTE: there has been a patch released that you can get from MS Support which I didn't try and may address some of these issues.

But the Official MS solution for including emails in your searches is to run Windows Desktop search and use that as your search interface and can include in SharePoint Search results in the same interface.

Neither of these approaches were going to work in reality for our customers and instead of turning to external search engines like X1, Fast or Autonomy we chose to develop our own solution to the problem. I usually don't talk about my own products in my blog, but I think there is such a need for this that I will do this ahead of our formal announcement.

We are now in beta testing of a SharePoint search connector for exchange http://www.sharepointworks.com/pages/escexchange.aspx which basically allows the inclusion of all your private mailbox content into your SharePoint index ( up to the 50 Million item limit) and provides a true Enterprise Search experience. Security is fully adhered to and you can configure master accounts (for discovery purposes) that have search access to all mailboxes if you choose. Besides its use as a replacement for Desktop search, it also provides very useful help desk functionality to search history across multiple mailboxes (thanks Martin for the idea). We took a very unique approach to crawling the Exchange content that basically provides a buffer between SharePoint and the Exchange servers to minimize impact on production systems and to allow more frequent updates to the search index (even with 50 million emails, incremental's can be done hourly). Contact me for more information or if you would like to participate in trials of this product.