Who is this article for?

Administrators setting up SharePoint to work with the Mail Manager web search.

M365 SharePoint Administrator and Search permissions are required.

When enabled, the Mail Manager web search is able to utilise SharePoint's index capabilities to allow users to find emails from any device.

This article shows you how to create the metadata columns necessary for indexing.

1. Creating a document library

In each SharePoint site, create a new document library using a consistent naming convention (e.g. Emails).

If the library already exists, ensure it doesn't contain more than 5000 items. If it does, you will need to move the email files into a newly created document library with metadata columns to ensure they will be indexed.

To check the number of items in a library:

1. Access the SharePoint site in a web browser.
2. Open Settings (Cog icon).
3. Select Site contents.

You will be taken to the site's Document Library, where the number of items for each library is shown.

2. Creating metadata columns

This setup can only be carried out if the Document Library contains fewer than 5000 items.

1. Open the Auto Discovery Tool.
   By default, it's located in %localappdata%\Mail Manager\Program Files\x64\MailManager.Autodiscovery.exe.
2. Select SharePoint.
3. Click Auto Discovery.
   A new window will appear called SharePoint AutoDiscovery.
4. Select Load Setup File.
5. Create a blank text file.
6. Add the required discovery pattern
7. Load the file.
8. Select Discover Locations.
   When finished, a file called UniqueDocLibs.txt will have been created alongside the file. It contains the unique ID of each document library and is used in the next step.
9. Go back to the Auto Discovery Tool.
10. Select SharePoint.
11. Click Metadata Iteration.
    A new window will appear called Metadata Iterator.
12. Select Load DocLibs File.
13. Choose the UniqueDocLibs.txt created in the previous step.
14. Click Open.
15. Select Iterate Metadata.

When finished, Mail Manager metadata columns will have been created in each document library. In addition, a file called SampleFile.txt will be created and metadata for the file added.

3. Reindexing a site

To add the new columns to the search index, they first need to be crawled. This can be achieved by reindexing a site that includes the new columns.

To reindex a site:

1. Access the SharePoint site in a web browser.
2. Open Settings (Cog icon).
3. Select Site information.
4. Choose to View all site settings.
5. Click Search and offline availability.

6. Click Reindex site.

7. Select a reason for reindexing.
8. Click Reindex site.

Depending on the amount of site content and the timing of next scheduled search crawl, it may take some time to complete the reindex (24-36 hours).

Further reading

Next steps

• Creating SharePoint managed properties

Additional resources

• Setting up SharePoint indexing
• Creating SharePoint managed properties
• Populating SharePoint metadata when filing
• Populating missing SharePoint metadata
• Using the SharePoint web search