Topic Last Modified: 2005-11-18

The Microsoft® Exchange Server Analyzer Tool queries the Active Directory® directory service to determine the value for the msExchCIAvailable attribute of each mailbox store. The value of this attribute indicates whether content indexing has been enabled for the mailbox store. A value of TRUE indicates that a content index exists for a mailbox store and that the Exchange System Manager setting "This index is currently available for searching by clients" is selected. A value of FALSE indicates that a content index exists for a mailbox store, but the Exchange System Manager setting "This index is currently available for searching by clients" is cleared. A value of <Not Set> indicates that a content index does not exist for the mailbox store.

The Exchange Server Analyzer also queries Active Directory to determine the value for the msExchCIRebuildSchedule attribute of each mailbox store. The value of this attribute indicates the rebuild schedule settings for the content index. This attribute is stored as an octet string with 82 pairs of hexadecimal values.

If the Exchange Server Analyzer finds the value of the msExchCIAvailable attribute set to TRUE, but the octet string value for the msExchCIRebuildSchedule attribute translates to "Never run", a warning is displayed.

The recommended best practice for setting the update interval is to schedule incremental updates at least once a day. You may want to schedule more frequent updates because the index is only as current as the last time it was populated. Indexes that are not regularly updated can produce inaccurate and out-of-date results.

You should also consider the time it takes to complete an incremental population. For example, a typical schedule sets incremental updates at the beginning of each hour. However, if the update lasts more than an hour, the next incremental population begins at the start of the following hour.

Generally, if the mailbox store is 6 gigabytes (GB) or smaller, you can perform incremental updates hourly. If the store is larger than 6 GB, or the server has high memory usage, you may want to update the index less frequently.

To set the full-text indexing Update Interval on a particular mailbox store

  1. Open Exchange System Manager.

  2. Expand Administrative Groups, expand your administrative group, expand Servers, expand your server, expand your storage group, right-click your mailbox store, and then click Properties. If the Administrative Groups node is not displayed in Exchange System Manager, expand Servers, right-click your server, and then click Properties.

  3. On the Full-Text Indexing tab, choose an option other than Never run.

  4. If you choose Use custom schedule, click Customize, set your own custom schedule, and then click OK.

  5. Click Apply.

For more information about configuring and troubleshooting full-text indexing in Exchange, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles, 822932, "HOW TO: Configure Full-Text Indexing on Mailbox Stores in Exchange 2003" (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=3052&kbid=822932) and 319436, "How to configure full-text indexing on mailbox stores in Exchange 2000" (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=3052&kbid=319436).

For more information about full-text indexing for Exchange Server, see Best Practices for Deploying Full-Text Indexing (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=5223).