Good news for Office 365 users, a future build of Windows 10 (available now in the new Windows Insider build), will restore the ability to search for email, appointments, and contacts in an Office 365 account outside of Outlook. Outlook users could initiate a search for email from the Windows shell in Windows 7 but the ability to search for Outlook items outside of Outlook was removed from Windows 8. One reason given for the change was to improve personal information security as Windows search could return results even if Outlook was closed.
Going forward, Cortana will be able to search your content in Office 365 including your emails, contacts, calendar along with files in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint. To enable this, you’ll need to connect your Office 365 work or school account to the Connected Accounts section of Cortana’s Notebook.
When you search, click the appropriate filter (email, contacts, calendar, or documents) at the top of Cortana’s search dialog (or type in calendar:, people:, or email:) to see results from your Office 365 account.
At least some filters work with the searches. Search queries found the messages I wanted to find but searching for appointments due on or message sent on a specific date wasn't always returning the expected results. Natural language dates aren't working either. It is surprisingly fast.
emails: from:you@domain.com
emails: from:you@domain.com subject:keyword
email: from:emo@slipstick.com date:(4/28/2016)
You won’t be able to search for email using the Search field in Windows Explorer and it only searches Office 365 business accounts, not .pst files or IMAP accounts, so it's not a perfect replacement of the old feature. Because it searches the mailbox online, you can use it even if your account is not configured in an Outlook profile as results open in Outlook on the web. If you're concerned about security, disconnect the account from Cortana to prevent others from searching your mailbox, however, other people will only see basic information in the search results. They need your password to actually read the item in Outlook on the web.
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5 Comments on "Coming Soon to Windows 10: Office 365 Search"
I miss the ability to search the Windows Shell for Outlook Items. Windows Vista introduced the ability to perform natural language searches such as "email sent last year to person" or "email received this month from person." The feature remained in Windows 7.
Yeah, it was handy. But it exposed data - anyone with access could search your computer and find your mail, even if the data file was password protected.
Hi. Thanks for proving one of the most useful MSFT productivity resource sites I've seen on the web. I was excited/relieved to read that the index facility was going to be fixed in Windows 10, although I see above that it isn't going to be able to read archived PST files or other IMAP accounts. ... is that right? ... Do you know if/when that is coming? Or if there is a reason it isn't? Thanks again. - Jeff
Correct, as far as I know, they won't be adding local data file support anytime soon. At this time, they haven't said whether or not they will do local files - the new search ties in with Delve and uses the server's index. Local search would need to use the local index. They removed support before for security reasons - it bypassed outlook's (already weak) security and allowed anyone access to your outlook data.
Thanks. Bummer. I can understand security issue, but woudl have hoped it could be made a feature turn-on/off able through a config setting. t's so useful when using Windows 7. Anyway. Thanks for letting me know.