How often do you hear your users lamenting the fact that
they get dozens or hundreds of e-mail messages per day? If you’re in a typical
organization, you probably hear this a lot, and the situation is only going to
become worse in the future. While getting a lot of mail may not be a problem,
wading through the mess later on can sometimes be extremely difficult. Outlook
does include a search mechanism, and Exchange supports full-text indexing of
the mail store. However, Outlook’s search capability isn’t all that great and
Exchange’s full-text indexing feature requires adequate processing power to
function.

Since information is the lifeblood of an organization, how
do you make it easy for your users to gain quick access to e-mail they need in
order to do their jobs? Try desktop search tools.

Other than speed and processing power, why would you use a
desktop search program instead of the tools included with Outlook and Exchange?
First of all, depending on the desktop search tool you choose, you can search
much more than just your Outlook/Exchange-based e-mail. Second, most desktop
search tools are very, very fast. No more waiting for Outlook to search through
your entire inbox; the desktop search tool has already indexed all of your
inbox contents for you. Third, many individual desktop search utilities are
free, including Google Desktop Search,
MSN Search
Toolbar/Windows Desktop Search, Copernic Desktop Search, Yahoo Desktop Search, and many more. There
are also enterprise-grade desktop search tools available that are more
appropriate for large deployments, including Google’s Desktop for Enterprise,
X1 and others.

Before you embark on a desktop search strategy, look for the
potential downfalls, including regulatory issues that may create problems
indexing content in a central location, desktop processor performance
requirements, and software features.

For any of you wondering which product I use, my choice has
been the free Copernic Desktop Search. I’ve used all
of the tools I listed a couple of paragraphs ago and Copernic
came out on top in my testing.