Outlook is the central point of information for the information worker. I’ll just leave that sentence without any further comments.
So when thinking in terms of context-aware environments (and for other business scenarios) where is the first place you might want to meta tag communication (emails) with context information. Outlook of course. So you attach a number of custom attributes to your emails depending on the context.
The next question is how do you find those emails based on custom attributes. There are two ways we would like to do it.
1. the Sharepoint Search way
We’ve just been at the AtE stand for MOSS and they’ve told us the crawler indexes those custom attributes (in public folders) anyway, and through central administration you can specify managed properties wihch then map these to specific Sharepoint attributes. You can also expose them to advanced search. So that’s an interesting way for all your enterprise email.
But the second question ist, what about personal email, stuff you don’t push to PFs and so on. Well the obvious answer would be Desktop Search. Now we didn’t get any response on the NGs about our question (wether it is possible to index custom properties and search for them with WDS -we are using 3.0) so we though we’d go and ask the guy at the AtE. As it happens he’s a very busy man 
Lot’s of questions and we gave up, so we’ll have to retry tommorow.
I’ll update this post as soon as I have an answer…
Tags: TechEd-Developers
