Creating a Full-Text Index

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The information store creates and manages indexes for common key fields for faster lookups and searches. When you enable full-text indexing, the index is built before the client search, thus permitting faster searches. Full-text indexing makes it easy for Outlook users to search for documents, including text attachments, in the information store. Each information store can be indexed individually for flexibility. For a discussion of how indexing works, refer to Chapter 2.

To enable indexing, right-click the store you want to index, point to All Tasks, and choose Create Full-Text Index. Even though your selection is Create Full-Text Index, all you are doing at this point is enabling the indexing feature for this store. You'll be prompted for a location in which to create the catalog. Once you have specified the location, click OK and the indexing objects are created. You will see these new objects inside the Full-Text Indexing object (Figure 11-20).

Figure 11-20. Objects created with Full-Text Indexing.

Initially, the Index State object will indicate that no full-text index was ever created for this store. In addition, the Last Build Time object will indicate that the catalog was never built. Thus, even though the indexing objects have been created, you still don't have a full-text index.

To create a full-text index, right-click the store object, point to All Tasks, and then choose either Start Full Population or Start Incremental Population. Start Full Population indexes all existing data, and Start Incremental Population indexes only information that is new or modified since the last full population. Depending on the amount of information in your store, this process could take from several minutes to several hours.

Once the index is populated, you will see that the value for the Number Of Documents Indexed container rises, as does the value for the Index Size (MB) container. You will also be able to discern when the last build time was for this store and the current location of your index databases.