Posted by kevin on 26. August 2009 06:41
We recently came upon an issue where the search feature, either in Mail or Contacts, was not working in Outlook Web Access on Exchange 2007. This is, apparently, not an uncommon issue. After some searching, I cam across a Microsoft TechNet article that gives a fix to the problem. Basically what happens is, much like a cache file in Outlook, the Full-Text Index Catalog can get corrupted for many reasons and these reasons seem to be generally unknown. The fix was, for us, anyway, fairly simple. The Exchange Management Shell has a tool built into it that you can run and get your search back up and running. It took us under 24 hours to get it back working and that was on a hosted server with hundreds of users. Here is what we had to do:
- Open the Exchange Management Shell
- Remove the Index Directories with the following command: ResetSearchIndex.ps1 –force –all (you can do a specific database also by replacing –all with the database name)
If you would like to read more on the subject or see the more in depth manual version (which I couldn’t get to work, for what its worth) click on the following link to see the full TechNet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa995966.aspx