Office 365: Search with ease

One of the recent additions that Office 365 has added to its suite of functionality is the ability to quickly search all the information in Office 365 from a single console. This includes all inboxes, every OneDrive and Team Site, all Yammer conversations, Skype for Business interactions and more.

eDiscovery is an Enterprise feature. It's not available in the Small Business plans.

This global searching ability can be made available to any user but in most cases you should enable it for existing Office 365 administrators. To do this you must first add them to a security group called eDiscoveryManager.

The first step in this process is to log into Office 365 as a global administrator and navigate to the Office 365 admin center. From the menu on the left of the screen, at the bottom, under the Admin section you need to select the Compliance option.

This will then take you to the new Compliance Center. If you don't see the option Search in the left hand menu select the Permissions option to configure which users can run searches.

Locate the group eDiscoveryManager and edit it to add the user(s) you wish to have the ability to search across all your information.

Once the security group has been updated with new users it will normally take 10 - 15 minutes for the Search option to appear in the Compliance Center for that user(s). When it does select it.

You should now see an empty list of searches. Select the plus (+) symbol to add a new search.

Give the search a name and select where you wish to search in Office 365. You can select everything or individual mailboxes and Team Sites if you wish, all other areas are added by default.

Next, enter the terms you wish to search for.

Upon completion, the search will commence. The time taken to complete will depend on the volume of information that you have elected to search across.

When the search is complete you will now see a summary of the result as well as link top preview the information returned.

In the Preview search results you can select each item and preview the information if display of that information is supported. You'll see the title of each item as well as where it is located and who the user is who created the information.

Using this basic search option you can only preview the results, if you need the ability to drill into the information or export it to send to a third party or put information on 'legal hold' you will have to use the more full featured eDiscovery options in Office 365. However, not all of these eDiscovery options are available to all Office 365 plans, so ensure you check what is available with your plan.

The basic search function available in the Office 365 Compliance Center is available for all Office 365 plans and allows you to quickly and easy search across all your information. You can also save searches to be re-run the in future if required. This ability is something that organizations have desired for many years and now with Office 365 it is possible.