About Collections

You can search four collections in Advanced Search to find results in live and archived data across multiple on-premise and cloud repositories:

  • Message: Email, attachments, calendar items, tasks, and associated metadata
  • Attachment: Attachments to emails, and associated metadata.
  • Document: Multiple file types across all repositories except email
  • Federated: Aggregated search for Messages, Attachments, and Documents

The collections that are available to you depend on what search locations you have enabled—see Location View.

The Federated collection is where you can perform an aggregated search within the Message, Attachment, and Document collections. Because it can search for all of these result types, it is often used alone.

The Message, Attachment, and Document collections can be used for more specific searches, for example, if you know what result type you are looking for.

In some cases, you will want to search the Federated collection along with another collection.

IMPORTANT
You can only search the Federated collection along with a Message, Attachment, or Document collection as long as the Federated Collection is in its own group.

To learn how groups work with collections—see About Groups.

You will not be able to search until you have added rules—see About Rules.

NOTE
In order to save your search criteria, you must perform the search before the 15-minute timeout.