Enterprise Search Guide

What matters is where the search index lives and who gets to see the content. The safest option is a search that indexes inside your own environment, respects existing permissions and transfers no content to third parties. Lookeen Server and Lookeen Desktop (On-Prem) work exactly like that: the index and content stay with you, so the search itself usually needs no data processing agreement. Read more under Data protection & GDPR.

A good enterprise search adopts existing permissions instead of maintaining its own. Lookeen Server reads the rights from Active Directory, the file system and Exchange and filters every result list by them. Sign-in is single sign-on through your Active Directory.

On isolated networks, search has to work entirely locally – without cloud services and without online activation. Lookeen Server runs without any connection to the vendor, and Lookeen Desktop (On-Prem) sends no data externally at all. Read more under Offline & air-gapped operation.

For an access request under Art. 15 GDPR you need to know where data about a person is stored – in emails, attachments, archives and file shares. With Lookeen you search all these sources at once and see every match in one list. Read more under eDiscovery and research.

The built-in search relies on the Windows Search index and on what is cached locally. In Cached Exchange Mode, depending on the setting, only part of the mailbox is kept offline, so older emails, PST files that are not attached or an incomplete index are missing from the results. A desktop search such as Lookeen builds its own index across mailboxes, archives and attachments, so older emails are found reliably too. Read more under Email search.

Outlook can only search PST files that are attached – with many or large archives this quickly gets unwieldy. Lookeen indexes PST archives even when they are not connected to Outlook and searches them together with your current mailbox. Read more under Searching PST archives.

Microsoft is phasing out Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online, completely by April 2027. Many tools will then no longer reach the Online Archive. Lookeen Server indexes mailboxes and Online Archives through the Microsoft Graph API, so they stay searchable after EWS is gone. Read more under Microsoft 365.

You need one shared index across all sources instead of separate search boxes in Outlook and File Explorer. Lookeen indexes email, attachments, local files, network drives and archives in one index and shows the results in one list, with a preview and highlighted search terms.

A central enterprise search indexes shares once on the server instead of every computer crawling them separately. Lookeen Server indexes file servers and network drives centrally, and each person only sees the folders they are permitted to. Read more under File server search.

Scanned documents only contain a picture of the text. Text recognition (OCR) is what makes the content searchable. Lookeen recognizes text in image-based PDFs, scans and screenshots and stores it in the search index without changing the original files. With Lookeen Server, text recognition can run locally. Read more under OCR for scanned documents.

The language model has to run where the data is. Lookeen AI works with language models in your own infrastructure: summaries, reviews and draft replies are produced on your own network, and your content is never used for training. Read more under AI with local models.

Desktop search indexes the data of a single workstation: your own mailbox, local files and archives. Enterprise search indexes centrally for the whole organization and respects each person's permissions. Lookeen is available as Lookeen Desktop for the individual workplace and as Lookeen Server for teams and organizations.

On terminal servers and virtual desktops, an index per session would multiply storage and processing. Lookeen Server indexes once, centrally, and clients only query the shared index. Read more under VDI and terminal servers.