Hi folks,

-We're running Outlook 2013 on our RDS pool machines (4x 2012 R2 servers).
-our Outlook mailboxes use Office365 accounts.
-Outlook is setup to cache 1 month (default is no caching but we've enabled it as it is the only way to get the yousendit plugin to work).
-Outlook Indexing however is disabled as adviced by our external consultants / MS Gold partner, using group policy : Computer configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Search\Prevent indexing Microsoft Office Outlook

The literal words of the consultants were : "you better disable indexing cause you might experience performance issues otherwise. Because Outlook will rebuild the index from scratch each time a user logs on on an RDS machine (with his/her roaming vxhd profile)".

Disabling Outlook indexing however results in advanced search features in Outlook being greyed out (I mean buttons "From", "subject", "more", etc. all greyed out).

My question is therefor multilayered :
-Is the consultant right about performance issues if we enable indexing ? Does it really have to rebuild from scratch with each logon ?
-If the best practice is indeed to disable indexing on an RDS machine : is there a workaround to get the advanced search features back ?

Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this.
Kind regards, Vincent

Hi Sir,

>>Is the consultant right about performance issues if we enable indexing ? Does it really have to rebuild from scratch with each logon ?

From my point of view ,during rebuilding the index for outlook data file "disk I/O" is the gratest impact on performance part .Generally , the user profile vhd should be placed on other computer , if that computer can provide good performance of disk I/O then indexing might won't impact performance too much .

All in all , it needs more test to check if the performance impact  is acceptable .

Best Regards,

Elton Ji

can you just clarify one by one, you are using exchange cached mode connection?

you are referring to the search indexer for Outlook?

are you using .OST files?

are you using .PST files?

what exactly is being indexed? just what's on the O365 mailbox or the locally saved emails too?

• Edited by armin19 14 hours 24 minutes ago