One of the problems with the continual upgrade cycle of computing (--> Connections, Quickr, XPages etc) is that it doesn't make efficient use of your existing environment - it's like buying a new TV when you could improve your viewing by re-tuning the old one.
Notes has been around for 20+ years, and it's distributed nature means users have their data scattered around many locations - Mail, Archives, Discussions, Document Repositories, File Systems, Apps, Quickr etc.
Over time, finding that information becomes more and more difficult - because users need to know roughly where it is. If they forget that, it can take a long time to find, or just not be found at all. It's surprising how much time (and therefore money) is spent looking for information.
The native Notes search facilities (Domain Search or Search Site - don't mention Extended Search) can search a lot of data and present a lot of results, but they don't present it very well or offer many options for using & refining it. They're fast, but navigating through hundreds of results that all look very similar is really just not useful enough, which is why few companies implement them.
It's much more efficient for users to be able to search only the data sources relevant to them, get easily understood and useful results, then refine their search or re-sort the results as necessary. This is slower than the native search methods, but it's much more accurate. This in turn is more useful, less frustrating, saves wasting time, and therefore saves money.
Giving your users tools to use the data they already have - as well as adding new tools such as Connections & XPages - is the best way to get the most from your Notes environment.
Searching Applications & File Systems directly from the Notes Client
Mon, May 13th 2013 11:13p IONET Software New functionality in the R9 Notes Client has finally allowed us to integrate our search tool properly into the Notes Search List, via Widget, as below; You could for example search your Notes Applications & Application Suites, server-based File Systems, and Quickr, all at the same time and directly from Notes. You can then add your Mail, Mail Archives, and local PC files to the list. That's a quick way to search a lot of information, and therefore save a lot of time. In addition, results [read] Keywords: dwa
inotes
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'Discovery-style' searching for Notes users
Mon, Apr 15th 2013 9:21p IONET Software During the upgrade to R9, we extended our File Indexer to automatically index the content of ZIP files (the File Indexer is an extension to the FT Search Manager, and allows you to index & search doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, odt, odp, ods, pdf, vsd, wpd, txt, htm and html files on your local PC or server-based File Systems. More information can be found here). In addition, the FT Search Manager itself now allows you to select and copy File System results to another location, or attach [read] Keywords: notes
notes client
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R9 support for all IONET products
Mon, Apr 8th 2013 11:13p IONET Software We're pleased to announce that all IONET products now support Notes/Domino R9 Social Edition. The main updates are; Change Manager (http://www.ionetsoftware.com/change) Support for all new R9 Directory fields & functions. Notes Client Browser (via User Reporting) Demo video here. FT Search Manager (http://www.ionetsoftware.com/search) New optional CSS-based UI for the iNotes Social Edition (note new search bar). Demo video here. Archiver for Notes (http://www.ionetsoftw [read] Keywords: domino
inotes
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Adding value to Lotus Notes
Thu, Feb 14th 2013 7:08p IONET Software One of our partners asked recently how they could add value to Notes for their customers. To that end, we've put together the following brief guide of how we think our software can add value to Notes and save customers money. 1. Adding Value for Users FT Search Manager If every Notes user spends just 5 minutes a day (a reasonably conservative number) looking for information - say an email they sent a month ago, a phone number in a customer quote, or technical information contained in a PDF [read] Keywords: domino
lotus
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FT Search Manager v5 - Full Notes Mail Integration
Mon, Nov 26th 2012 12:10p IONET Software We're pleased to announce the availability of FT Search Manager v5, allowing full Notes Mail integration, as shown below. This integration can be implemented into the R853 Standard Client (Mail Files or Templates) via a single click, and provides yet another search method for Notes Clients, in addition to our existing Search Scope, Widget, Actions & Toolbar Icon search methods. Minimised Maximised The UI is fully translatable (via documents, the Search button here is shown in German), and [read] Keywords: notes
archive
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Adding search highlighting to Notes documents
Wed, Oct 24th 2012 10:10p IONET Software As part of a recent upgrade to our FT Search Manager product, we added a workaround/hack to offer (optional) search highlighting to Notes Mail documents. For quite some time, this functionality has been 'available' in standard Notes Full Text searches, although it seems pretty hit and miss, and usually doesn't work with MIME content. As for the Agent property ''Store highlights in document", we've never found a way to use it (has anyone?) So to add our own version, we used a Javascript [read] Keywords: agent
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The limitations of Notes Mail searching
Mon, Sep 24th 2012 12:13a IONET Software Lotus Notes is great at many things, but the native search capability is not one of them. A majority of Notes Mail users will have personal silos of information, most of it corporate, stacked up in their mail file and possibly also contained in several archive databases. When they want to search that information, they have to know roughly where the target resides, i.e. their production mail or whatever archive, because there is no central index. That means opening each database manually and se [read] Keywords: ibm
lotus
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archive
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Adding Google-style Category-based searching
Thu, Sep 13th 2012 6:10p IONET Software The latest addition to our Notes FT Search Manager is (optional) Category-based searching directly from the Results Page, as per most common Web search engines. This means the Results Page also displays the available Categories, so users can refine their search, using both Notes or Web. If you're using a Category-based search originally, the Category list is the same, otherwise it's based on the Categories defined for your selected Databases (and even documents within each Database can be [read] Keywords: notes
notes client
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Free Notes Domain Search Extension
Thu, Aug 30th 2012 4:13p IONET Software Many Notes environments will have tried the Domain Index/Domain Search at some time or another, but few will actually use it. This is because while it's fast and free, the User Functionality is poor and the User Interface is not great. It hasn't noticeably changed since it was first introduced. So to improve it, we've added a free Domain Search Extender* to our FT Search Manager tool, seamlessly integrating with the existing Notes Client & Web Browser Domain Search. This means you c [read] Keywords: notes
notes client
blogger
database
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OpenOffice support added to our free File System Indexer
Mon, Aug 20th 2012 11:14p IONET Software We've recently added OpenOffice (*.odt, *.odp, *ods) support to our free File Systems Indexer database.This Notes database uses Apache libraries http://poi.apache.org, http://pdfbox.apache.org and http://incubator.apache.org/odftoolkit to extract text from and index the following file types: doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, vsd, pdf, odt, odp, ods, wpd, txt, htm and html.This in turn allows users to search File Systems (server-based or local) using standard Full Text search queries, from their [read] Keywords: inotes
notes
notes client
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