|
Microsoft has been crowing mightily about a problem with Google Apps Sync.
Google Apps Sync is a utility to synchronize Outlook email, calendar and contacts with the Google Apps online services.
According to Microsoft, when you install Google Apps Sync the program will disable Windows Desktop Search (WDS). That’s a problem because Outlook’s ‘Instant’ Search relies on WDS to find items within Outlook.
We wonder why Google did this. Sure, they’d prefer people to use their Google Desktop Search but the Google and Microsoft search products can co-exist on the one machine. There’s no obvious reason to disable the Outlook indexing especially since Outlook will alert you quickly that indexing won’t take place.
Some people have suggested that it’s not a bug because you can use Google Desktop Search to find Outlook items. That’s true but using GDS to find things in Outlook isn’t as convenient as the internal Outlook search, even though the latter isn’t as ‘instant’ as advertised.
Disabling a rival’s product is the sort of trick we’ve come to expect from Microsoft, so Redmond’s complaints about this does seem a little ironic.
It’s disappointing that Google seems silent on the subject. We could not find any response from Google to Microsoft’s allegations. Again, this reminds us of Microsoft, though admittedly these days Redmond tends to be more open about ‘issues’.
The fix
If you want to run Google Apps Sync and have Outlook’s ‘Instant’ Search then all you have to do is reverse the registry change made by Google:
In RegEdit go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search
Change the value of PreventIndexingOutlook to 0 (single digit – zero)
Microsoft doesn’t say so but in our experience you’ll need to restart the Windows Search service or Windows itself for the registry change to take effect.
According to Microsoft, uninstalling Google Apps Sync does not reverse the registry change.
Article posted: Tuesday, 30 June 2009
More from Office Watch:
|
RSS feed for this category