Exchange 2019 Search Issues

Question

Hi,

I'm in the process of migrating my orgs email infrastructure from Exchange 2013 to Exchange 2019
All new Exchange servers are running 2019 CU6, the Outlook client is the latest Office 365 click to run version, latest updates applied.

I'm 600 mailboxes into the migration, and I'm starting to get users complaining about being unable to search Outlook.
All of the Outlook clients are in cached mode by default.

During my investigation I'm seeing that whilst in cached mode performing a search eventually times out with the "Something went wrong and your search couldn't be completed", "It looks like there is a problem with your network connection"
Clicking the "Let's look your computer instead" link will return results contained in the local .ost file, but only going back as far as 3 or 4 months ago.
Cached mode is set to have all mail downloaded it is worth noting.

Putting Outlook in Online mode instead of cached mode does not improve things, exactly the same results are experienced when searching.

After reading a few threads I have restarted the following services on all new mailbox servers "Microsoft Exchange Search", MIcrosoft Exchange Search Host Controller" with the hop that the database search indexes will be refreshed/rebuilt. I did this yesterday and left the servers overnight, but there is no improvement in searching in my testing.

Has anyone had simliar experiences with their setup, and more importantly being able to fix these issues?
Considering Exchange 2019 is now on CU6 I find that this issue still being apparent is really poor.

Thanks

Matt

Answer 1

Has anyone found a resolution to this issue yet? We have the same problem:

After installing an earlier CU (CU6 perhaps), BigFunnel stopped on all mailboxes. Every search now only yields emails prior to the CU install date.

• I've tried installing CU9 and CU10 and still broken.
• I've tried migrating mailboxes to a new database but get an error that I can't migrate because BigFunnel indexing is out of sync or something like that, so a catch 22.
• I've tried Start-MailboxAssistant -Identity user1 -AssistantName BigFunnelRetryFeederTimeBasedAssistant

Answer 2

I am about to open a ticket with MS support too about this very subject. We have recenlty migrated to E2019 CU6 at first and not had anyone reporting any issues. Personally though, I did noticed search problems thing during the testing phase but at the time some of the articles have suggested using Outlook in cache mode which returned more and better results. We only recenlty started to allow users to use Outlook in cache mode and plan to have everyone the same way so I did not thougut this will become a big problem. Of course, I have started to receive more and more complains from the users which are now are not able to find items in their mail and is affecting their day to day tasks.

We have upgraded the E19 servers to CU8 and I will be looking to upgrade to CU10 in the next few months but I would like to know if MS is actively working on a fix and it would be worth waiting for another release that will address these search issues. I did used the following command on some mailboxes : Start-MailboxAssistant -Identity <Mailboxid> -AssistantName BigfunnelRetryFeederTimeBasedAssistant which seems to have improved the experience for a few users but it is still not working as it should.

Answer 3

I have the same issue on CU8, I have since upgraded to CU 9 and CU10 with no success.
Opened a (paid for )case with Microsoft support, spent a month trying lots of options with them with no success. Also unable to migrate any mailboxes to a new database because the search data is not up-to date, quiet ironic that a outdated search issues prevents you fixing a search issue.
Microsoft eventually closed the case saying at this stage they have no fix and I need to watch for future CU's when it "may" be addressed.
Very disapointed