Programming Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, Second Edition (DV-MPS Programming)

Chapter 17

Microsoft Exchange Server allows you to store a multitude of document types, but while it's a great mechanism for storing information, it doesn't allow you to easily search for this information. And your Exchange Server public folder hierarchy can quickly get hairy. Faced with these two limitations, your users will undoubtedly have a hard time finding the information they need.

This information retrieval problem isn't only a problem for Exchange Server. In your organization, you probably have a broad scale of information repositories such as file shares, databases, and Web sites. Since different types of data exist in these locations, it's hard to normalize search parameters. Plus, you might even have multilingual documents stored in a single location, so you might not find the information simply because it is in a different language or a different format and your search doesn't find a match.