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.

Managed properties enable the data in the Mail Manager columns to be regularly crawled, indexed, and searched. Whilst the Managed Properties can be configured at an individual site level, we recommend applying them at the tenant level, as this will reduce the need to repeat the process site by site.

This article walks you through the process of creating the necessary managed properties for the search.

Note that this process depends upon you having created the Mail Manager metadata columns against a document library inside a tenant.

This process needs to be done only once per tenant

1. Checking search configuration

To check whether you can configure the properties:

1. Go to the SharePoint admin centre.
2. Select More features on the left.
3. Click Open (under Search).

4. Select Manage Search Schema.

5. Go to the Crawled Properties section.
6. In the Filters section, enter ows_EmSubject. Note that when trying this process in November 25 SharePoint did not return any results when searching for ows_EmSubject but a search for Subject did return the column, showing the the properties had been added to the crawled properties list. 

If found, continue to the next section. If not found, please try again later.

2. Importing search configuration

2.1. Automatic configuration

Depending on your existing SharePoint configuration this method may not work. In this instance, proceed to the manual configuration steps. When trying this in November 25, the automatic configuration did not work and we proceeded with the manual configuration which did work

To import the configuration:

1. Go to the SharePoint admin centre.
2. Select More features on the left.
3. Click Open (under Search).

4. Select Import Search Configuration.
5. Choose the XML file provided here by our Support team.
6. Click Import.

This will trigger the crawl, which will take some time to complete.

Once completed, you can go back to the Manage Search Schema screen and filter by Email and/or Refinable to see a list of the new managed properties:

2.2. Manual configuration

To complete the configuration:

1. Go to the SharePoint admin centre.
2. Select More features on the left.
3. Click Open (under Search).

4. Select Manage Search Schema.
5. Click New Managed Property.

6. Create a new property for each of the lines based on the following table.

Managed Properties (text)
Click the Expand icon to view a full size version of the table.

Note that the characteristics below apply to every row in the table. I.e. every property has to be Searchable, Queryable, Retrieveable, not allow Multiple Values, have the correct Alias etc...

Managed Properties (other)

This is a list of other properties, they are separated because different characteristic apply to each, they also must be refinable which marks another difference from the list above.

1. Use the filter to list a suitable Refinable Managed Properties based on the type. In other words, the following table are more settings to be applied to more managed properties but these must be refinable managed properties. They probably already exist so use the filter to find each one and then edit its properties. If you cannot find the property then add a new one.
2. Select an unused property and configure based on the following table.

Click the Expand icon to view a full size version of the table.

Further reading

Next steps

• Populating SharePoint metadata when filing
• Populating missing SharePoint metadata
• Using the SharePoint web search

Additional resources

• Setting up SharePoint indexing
• Creating SharePoint metadata columns