Our Company has been using Outlook Express and POPing mail from Lotus Domino. Due to a number of issues, we are planning to migrate the entire company to Lotus Notes.
However the difference in UI is getting in the way of a trouble free migration. One of the biggest setback is a lack of a search feature that is simple to use with powerful results.
We would like a search template that would contain basic fields such as
From
TO
CC
BCC
Subject
Date
Attachment
Size
etc…
I know this information can be entered in the Notes client, but it is not straight forward. I am not a Domino Developer therefore using Designer will be of no avail.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Subject: Search Made Simple
amazing, outlook people complaining about the lack of simple but powerful search in Notes.
I do not think you can easily search by size, but
- you have always full text search that is simple to use and give powerful results – so you do not need any form, just the plain old full text search field that is always around and that you can use to search all fields including attachments. And any time you get too many results back you can fine-tune it. Say you search for “Lotus” and get back 1000 hits, to you add “AND John” and within seconds you get the reasonable bunch of results.
In fact you can type in the query by field, but it may be inconvenient to use often. So you could type also AND [From] = John* or type query such as “(lotus and notes) and not outlook”.
And finally you can search in this way only a particular folder or view/selection AND you can create whatever view you want without being a designer or having Domino designer installed.
So I guess the power is how you use the search.
- you can always create a form if you really want to search by field (what’s simple about that? you need to know which field contains your search text), but as you are not a Domino developer and you probably have none in the whole company and cannot hire one to do this job (that will probably take 1/2 h to write with all bells and whistles and couple more hours to test/accept/deploy), then point two probably is a hopeless suggestion.
Subject: RE: Search Made Simple
Thanks for the reply.
We were aware of the Full-Text search and ways of tweaking. But some of our users would also like a to have a template that would have the necessary fields and they can plug in the information.
I wouldn’t mine giving this to a Domino Designer who can get the job done. If you know anybody who can do this, please do let me know.
Thanks
Arun
Subject: Search Made Simple - for thought
Just about any developer in this forum can do the job for you. I would try to be as specific as possible, since they the logic you are trying to build will try to mimic what full text already does. For example will you have this form have the simple and’s and or’s. for example
Find all from = “John doe” or the dateSent > 1/1/2007
or
find all from = (“John Doe” and datesent > 1/1/2007) or (Subject contains Important and datesent >= 1/1/2006 and datesent < 1/31/2006)
John
you then also have the issue on how you want the results being sent back to you, and if you prefer having the most up to date results, or on the full text index wo update its index.
You also did not state if this was a client, web or both.
However a simple form may only take a few hours to complete.
Cheers,
John
Subject: RE: Search Made Simple - for thought
Thanks John,
The fields the i’ll be needing is specific to
-
From - Contains/Does Not Contain (input)
-
To - Contains/Does Not Contain (input)
-
Subject - Contains/Does Not Contain (input)
-
Message - Contains/Does Not Contain (input)
-
Date - Is on/ Is not on/ Is Between/ Is not Between/ (input)
-
Attachment - Contains/Does not Contain (input)
We would like to have fuzzy search built in with this search.
The results should be with most relevant/sortable.
Also an option to choose the folders to search.
We are using this for the Notes Client.
Please do let me know.
Thanks again
Subject: RE: Search Made Simple - for thought
Why not use the standard out of the box “Fill out example form” search option and allow the user to pick the form and fields they would like to search for - this should give you what you need.
Subject: RE: Search Made Simple - for thought
The sample for is not very accurate.
For example when I put the users name in the from field, it pulls that information from replies and forwards as well.
Also, I cannot specify a range.
Subject: RE: Search Made Simple - for thought
Perhaps if you read up on the search functionallity in notes help. Its not that difficult to educate the users how to use the notes search query builder.
If you click on the field, choose your field, it changes based on the field type (text, date, number). For date fields, it does allow you select “is between”
So your query would look something like:
field From contains me@yahoo.com AND DeliveredDate is between 01/01/2007, 03/01/2007
The users can save the searches as well.
Or just hire a developer to tweak the mail template which is not recommended since you are changing the Lotus notes mail design - opening up a big can of worms.
Subject: RE: Search Made Simple - for thought
Arun,
Maybe you misunderstood, I was trying to help you when you were going to ‘hire’ a consultant. Your first posting was quite generic, which is why I told you that it may only be a few hours to create what you want, however there were so many other questions that were not asked.
I was not trying to solicit work from you, although I have gotten work from helping others on the forum. I would also suggest that not only with me, but all, that this is not the place, but rather taken off-line.
Just one other item … you will have to make sure that all the mail files are full indexed - schedule depends on you and the admin. You may also have to have your people upgrade their archive mail files, if on their local machine. I lied, one more thing, some adobe attachments while searchable, did not search for words we knew where in the document.
John