In theory, Notes can find things. In practice however ...
by Volker Weber
Darren Duke has an interesting post:
The most useful feature of Lotus Notes that most users can’t use - Full Text Indexing
And he is spot on. Every single one of my customers has full text indexing switched off. They have consolidated their servers, put their mailboxes on expensive storage to keep the performance up, and then switched off the full text index and put in a draconian quota to save money on storage. You can only work around that limitation by replicating the mail file to the local disk, and then adding a FT index to that. Only few people know this and it is not being encouraged.
User satisfaction is king. And right now, due in some large part to this restriction, the majority of user are anything but satisfied when it comes to searching. And the shocker here is not that lack of functionality but being able to enable said functionality.
User satisfaction should be king. But it isn't. And that's what is driving Notes out.
Comments
I can so relate to that. The same applies in my environment, mailboxes on expensive storage, switched off FT index, mail quota, ... we actually have a solution in place which extracts attachments to a cheaper storage after some time and interferes with the replication to make the full DB available on local replicas. From a system design point of view - terrible if you ask me.
I agree. And other customers move the whole Notes data directory to a network drive and all DB accesses are slower that they need to be because of network latency. and you can't make them replicate selected databases to the local workstation (e.g. by using directory links that point to the workstation's hard drive), because its additional effort.
Ragnar, for attachments DAOS is your friend.
in theory you could use hardlinks on windows (not sure if will be supported though)
but then again it would be easier to add a notes_path_to_fte in notes.ini :)
Well the request to put the fulltext index folders on another drive/array is nothing new but so far has not been delivered.
You don't need to back them up (you can easily exclude them but often it does not happen) , they don't need RAID security (at least it is not mission critical) and performance in some way is less important.
Although I know of some users who put a mail in a folder just to search for it a few seconds later in the "All Documents" view (then being disappointed that the mail "disappeared").
But if this is driving Notes out then I keep asking myself what product is handling full text searching more efficient (besides maybe Google or undercharged cloud offerings)?
Exchange isn't (?) and this is what I still consider being the major target for Notes migrations.
This is a trend, I already recognized a couple of years ago. While I find that Notes does not have the most sexiest mail interface in the world, IMHO, it becomes quite useless without sophisticated search features. I am currently working on a big enterprise search project and once more got to know how important search capabilities are for the end user. And which applications is more business critical than email....?
Henning, Ingo works for Microsoft. Is that an answer? And yes, Google is a good example. Search is enabled, and it does not count against your quote.
I can't confirm that this would be the usual case with the customers i know. Nearly all of them have FT enabled and users use it. I have come across this only a few times and always it was only temporarily state which the admins were aware of and inteded to fix once they get space. However i have seen ridiculously small size quotas (100MB) more often.
Don't know why this seem to be different in my region (Czech rep., Germany, Austria)
Moreover if the admins would want to fix it then they would have options even now:
-Create the FT-index at least without indexing attachments, which makes it fairly small
-Move the FT-index of each db to an other disk and create a symlink
But of course i also agree that this should be configurable and that it has been requested for a looong time.
PS: And by the way it would be great if we could configure the FT-index in much more depth. Like select only which documents and which items to index. This would not only make the FT-index smaller, but often also more exact.
I obviously can't speak for all customers, but I know several who keep full text search enabled because that is what their users need. I'm not sure that I know specifically of a company that does not, but I will think about it.
Any tool is only effective if configured properly.
... isn't that fun?
They try to save money on the back of their users satisfaction by crippling Notes to the point where it is a pain to work with, but have no problem to move to Exchange with a three times higher price tag.
@vowe DAOS could be my friend, maybe. But apparently it's not our IT department's or our service provider's friend (the latter being the company that develops the product). To be fair, the solution I referred to was introduced when our servers were still 7.x (and the article you linked to talks about things being available as of 8.0).
@Christian: Some in my organization have argued that the cost savings in storage are more than outweighed by the costs of a crippled e-mail system. But apparently that didn't ring well with the decision makers.
I've just done a quick test, but found no problem with using a directory link file to access the FT index, e.g. database.ft pointing to a directory containing the index files somewhere outside the server data directory.
This allowed me to update the index successfully either manually or via a server command, and search multiple databases.
So I think we'll offer this as an option in our FT Search Manager product, along with DWA mail & archive searching (how's that for a shameless plug).
Cheers
Peter
How's that? Pretty good. :-)
so the big question is will ibm support it oficially when its a documented OS feature or will they say its not the same on all platforms and leave support out.
@Volker, thanks
@Flemming, I'm guessing option 2.... but we'll add it as an option, and let the customer decide.
It also allows you to set up the link file, then build the index, which then gets built in the location specified. That's pretty handy.
@Peter
Sounds very handy when automated :)
This method of changing the FTI location is not reliable enough to be used, sometimes it works fine, but at other times you get a 'index is in use' type error, so it's not worth pursuing.
I wonder if there is an OS way to do the same thing?
If the OS is Vista, Windows 7 or a version of unix, it seems to be possible to use symbolic links to move the Full Text Index. So we've written a utility that lets you do this, which if it proves acceptable enough, we'll give away and also include in our FT Search Manager product.
Basically you define your dbs, and for each db, the new index location (or the same for all), and if the db should be automatically 'processed' or not. The utility will move the index files in the FTGI folder to the location\server\filepath, then set up a symbolic link to the moved files. We move the ftgi folder because Notes seems to insist the dir.ft directory exists in the normal location.
If an index is rebuilt, it'll recognise this and move the files again. Updates occur as normal.
So right now we're looking for testers, is anyone keen? If so please email me via peter at ionetsoftware dot com
