Give Users Access to Multi-Mailbox Search

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Applies to: Office 365 for enterprises, Live@edu

A person who has a business need to search for e-mail and other message types in any mailbox in their organization is called a discovery manager.

Who might be a discovery manager? Here are a few examples:

  • School administrators investigating reports of inappropriate e-mail being sent within their school.
  • Lawyers collecting and storing electronic documents and e-mail messages in preparation for or execution of a lawsuit.
  • Human resources officers investigating harassment complaints in their organization.
  • IT administrators looking for viruses introduced to their domain through e-mail messages or attachments.

A discovery manager needs permissions to perform the following tasks:

  • Use Multi-Mailbox Search in the Manage My Organization > Mail Control > Discovery tab of the Exchange Control Panel. Without the necessary permissions, users can't access the Discovery tab in the Exchange Control Panel.
  • Access a discovery mailbox where search results are stored. The Discovery Search Mailbox is a default mailbox created by Microsoft Exchange.

The easiest way to allow a user to search mailboxes is to add the user to the Discovery Management role group. For more information about role groups, see Administrator Role Groups in Exchange Online.

Add a user to the Discovery Management role group

  1. Select Manage My Organization > Roles & Auditing > Administrator Roles.
  2. In the list of role groups, click Discovery Management, and then click Details.
  3. Under Members, click Add.
  4. In the Select Members dialog box, select the user. You can search for a user by typing all or part of a display name, and then clicking Search icon. You can also sort the list by clicking the Display Name or E-Mail Address column headings.
  5. Click Add and then click OK to return to the role group page.
  6. Click Save to save the change to the role group.

In the details pane, the user is now listed under Members and can access Multi-Mailbox Search in the Exchange Control Panel.

Give a user access to a discovery mailbox

As explained earlier, members of the Discovery Management role group can use the default Discovery Search Mailbox to store and view mailbox search results. However, you may want to create additional discovery mailboxes and assign permissions to open those mailboxes to specific people. For example, lawyers working on different lawsuits may need to store search results in different discovery mailboxes so that access to the results can be restricted to only those working on a specific lawsuit. In this case, you can create a discovery mailbox for each legal team and then assign permissions to open each of those mailboxes to the appropriate people. For more information, see Create a Discovery Mailbox to Store Search Results.

Assign permissions where search results are stored

Run the following Windows PowerShell command:

Add-MailboxPermission <Discovery mailbox> -User <Display Name> -AccessRights FullAccess

For example, to give Holly Holt access to the discovery mailbox created for the Fabrikam Corporation lawsuit, run the following command:

Add-MailboxPermission Fabrikam_MailboxSearchResults -User "Holly Holt" -AccessRights FullAccess

Next steps

After you make a user a discovery manager, be sure to tell them how to run a mailbox search, view the search results, open a discovery mailbox in Microsoft Office Outlook, and export search results to an Outlook Data File (.pst). Here's how: