Exchange 2010 Multi-Mailbox Search; How To and Why?

Written by Praveen

Tuesday, 07 December 2010 00:05

Multi mailbox search is one of the features introduced with Exchange 2010. This feature is very useful when you need to perform discovery searches for some required contents within Exchange mailboxes in your organization. For example, if your company adhere to legal searches you can make use of this feature. Also this can be used for Internal email verification, HR monitoring like searching for confidencial emails in set of user's mailboxes etc.

Multi-Mailbox search uses the content indexes created by the exchange search. You can give the ECP(Exchange Control Panel) feature as an easy to use interface for non-technical people to do the multi-mailbox search. Role Based Access Control (RBAC) provides a default 'Discovery Management' management role group to delegate the discovery tasks to users, thus ensuring only required permission are been given. This way the administrator can ensure that the user cannot perform any organization changes.

If you wanted to delegate permission to a user or a set of users for multi-mailbox search, you may add them to the Discovery Management RBAC role group, which contains two management roles. 1. Mailbox Search Role and 2. Legal Hold Role. By default this role group does not contain any members, that means none of the users including the Exchange Organization administrators do not have permission to perform the Multi-Mailbox search. However, the Exchange Administrators who are member of Organization Management role group can add users into the Discovery Management role group to perform the multi mailbox search.

Once the user is added to the Discovery Management role group, those can perform the multi-mailbox search using the Exchange Control Panel. Below screen shot shows a typical Multi-Mailbox Search window. Once you have entered the required information on New Mailbox Search, click on 'Save' button at the bottom of the window, that's all.

Multi-Mailbox_Search