Outlook 2016 says a group policy has turned off windows search

This may help

https://lookeen.com/blog/how-to-fix-outlook-2016-search-problems

check with one user if fixes you may need to apply with GPO with Office2016 Admx

https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=49030

Thanks. There's nothing in the 'how to' article that I haven't tried.  I'm working through the administrative template for Outlook 2016, but as of right now don't see anything that applies to the warning message we're getting. Most things in the ADM concerning search seem to apply to an Exchange setting, which doesn't apply here.

Thanks.  There's nothing in the 'how to' article that i haven't tried (to no avail).  I'm working through the administrative templates but so far nothing.  Most of the search policy options in the Outlook template refer to restricting something and/or an Exchange environment, not what I'm looking for.

Problem solved. Turns out the issue was partly of my own making, partly the result of changes Microsoft appears to have made to the search function in Outlook. A brief summary: the office I support was on Office 2007 until early this year. Not an Exchange environment, everyone had their own PST files and the 'heavy hitters' had their PST files on the data server so they could be backed up (I know: not recommended by Microsoft but necessary to preserve e-mails in case of hard drive failure).  Searches worked, searched text was highlighted in the found messages. With the upgrade to Office 2016, searches no longer returned anything. The only solution I found was to create a registry entry under HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsSearch\PreventIndexingOutlook=1. Although that allowed searching (without highlighted text), it turns out that was the 'group policy' that was slowing searches.  The actual solution was multi-step, and was only available since a change to the backup method now allows for an agent to be installed on the users' machines so that 'local' files could be backed up:

• Move the PST files to the local machine.
  
• Reset Outlook to 'look' to the PST files on the local machine.
  
• Reset archiving to look to the appropriate archive file on the local machine.
  
• Set PreventindexingOutlook to 0 (or remove it entirely).
  
• Set indexing to include the location of the PST files on the local machine.  I set all the machines to use Outlook from a common location on the C: drive, because the users' AppData (where Outlook defaults to for PST files) is excluded from searches by default and I didn't want to include all the 'garbage' that is under that folder in the index.
  
• Set the indexing option for PST files to 'Index Properties and File Contents'.
  
• Remove any indexing for the previous version of Outlook (which, incidentally, DID seem to include the PST files, even if they were on the server - no clue how that worked, because in its current incarnation indexing options doesn't appear to allow inclusion of files on a mapped drive).
  
• Rebuild the index.
  

Et voila, Outlook searches now work fast, and searched text is highlighted.