Microsoft Office XP includes a new search feature to help users find the information they need. This search feature is part of the new Task Pane in most Office XP applications (not available in Microsoft Outlook® 2002). Users can search through files on their computer, items in Outlook, or on their network. These search areas are called scopes. There are two types of search scopes: content scopes (that include Office documents, HTML documents, and Outlook items), and media scopes (that include clip art, photographs, movies, and sounds).

The following content scopes are available for searches:

• My Computer — Content that is stored on disk drives on the user's computer.
• Outlook — Content in Outlook e-mail messages, contacts, appointments, notes, and tasks.
• My Network Places (Microsoft Windows® 2000 and Windows Millennium Edition) or Web Folders (Windows NT® 4.0 and Windows 98) — Content that is stored in folders on a server running SharePoint™ Team Services or SharePoint Portal Server or on servers that have content indexed by Index Server (Windows NT 4.0) or Indexing Service (Windows 2000).

 Note    Office XP Search includes support for quicker content searching. Although this feature is not required to use the Search functionality, enabling support for fast searching creates an index that makes searching faster. By default (on operating systems other than Windows 2000), support for fast searching is installed with Office XP. If you are running Windows 2000, Office uses Indexing Service, which is installed by the operating system, for fast searching. After Indexing Service and Office XP are installed, users can turn the Indexing Service on or off by using the Search options link in the Task Pane.

The following media scopes are available for searches in Clip Organizer:

• My Collections — Media in the user's Favorites collection, plus any unclassified or user-created media.
• Shared Collections — Media that is stored on a shared network file server.

  This scope is disabled by default.

• Office Collections — Media that comes with Office XP.
• Web Collections — Media from the Internet, including media from Clips Online or third-party providers.

  This scope is disabled by default.

• Old Collections — Media imported by the user (if any).

Managing search scopes

As an administrator, you can control how users in your organization use Office XP Search by changing values in the Windows registry. Using the registry entries, you can determine which search scopes are available to users, determine whether a particular scope is included in the search by default, and add new search scopes.

The search scopes are listed as subkeys under the following path in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Common\Search\Scopes

To disable or change the default state for a search scope, you edit the registry information for that scope.

Disabling a search scope

By default, the search scopes included with Office XP are available to users except for the Web Collections and Shared Collections scopes. (You can enable the Web Collections and Shared Collections scopes by setting a subkey in the Windows registry.) You can make other search scopes unavailable for searching by disabling the scope. For example, if you do not want users to search through Outlook content, you can disable the Outlook scope in the Windows registry. When you disable a scope, it no longer appears in the list of scopes in the Search area of the Task Pane.

Each search scope has a subkey in the Windows registry. To disable a search scope, you add a Disabled value to the scope subkey, with the REG_DWORD format and the value 1. To enable a scope, set the Disabled value to 0. For example, to disable the Outlook scope, you open the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Common\Search\Scopes\My Email registry subkey, add a DWORD value called Disabled, and set the value to 1.

Adding search scopes

You can programmatically create additional search scopes for your users. For more information, see the Office Developer Center on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN).