Removing the clutter: De-duplicating Mail Search results

In general, mail files contain a lot of duplicated data, due to the 'Reply With History' function. 

So if you search for a phrase in the first email of a thread, you'll probably receive results from ALL the other emails in the thread as well, which clogs up the result set and makes it harder to find your target.

The IONET FT Search Manager now optionally allows users to de-duplicate mail results, displaying only the latest entry in the thread, containing all information from the rest of the thread.

This makes it much easier to find target data, as you don't have to wade through a lot of very similar, repeated results. Of course you can still search normally if you're looking for a specific email.

Without De-Duplication

With De-Duplication

You can also use our 'Navigate to Query' option to automatically move to the first instance of the search term used, which speeds up the target identification process.

And seeing as email is person-person communication, specifying a name in the query (or a domain name) increases search accuracy significantly.

Try it out free of charge and with no obligation, and we think you'll be surprised at the results.

The IONET FT Search Manager - Targeted Notes searching

Our version of the IBM Mail Next 'Faceted Search'

In a recent webcast, IBM demonstrated several aspects of the search capabilities in IBM Mail Next. 

Once of these was 'faceted search', which allows users to choose elements of the result set (facets) and refine their query using that data.

To show how our search product, the FT Search Manager, can also provide faceted searching, we've put together the short video below (the other Mail Next search functionality mentioned, searching Sametime Chats Transcripts, we can already do).

Please note that in our product you can construct search results using any combinations of fields, text and @formulas. In all cases, the tool will correctly identify the type of result data (text, mail address, date, number etc), and allow you to select facets based on that. For example, an Email address will let you choose the sender or domain, a Date will let you choose various timeframes around the selected date, a Number will let you add margins to the selected number etc. And this works for any application you search, not just Mail.

To try this yourself, please download the no-obligation, no-install demo from http://www.ionetsoftware.com/search, and start searching.

FTSM V6 Faceted Search Demo

Adding Search Options to iNotes Mobile Search

To complete our iNotes Mobile Search product - giving mobile users full access to all of their historical mail data - we've added user search options.

Administrators can still default and/or hide whatever settings they want, but this allows users more control over their mobile search environment.

This makes it even easier for them to find any mail (including archives) when on the road.


1. Mobile Home (with new Search icon)

2. Search Interface

3. Search Options

4. Searching






















5. Results

 

















For more information, please visit http://www.ionetsoftware.com/inotes.

Improving user efficiency in a Notes environment

Earlier this month, we ran a survey with our FT Search Manager users.

We asked them how much time, per employee per week, they thought the FT Search Manager was saving them.

The average answer was 1 hour 23 minutes per person, per week. That equates to a saving of 8.3 days per person, per year, as described by the users themselves.

Note that we restricted the survey results to 'general' searching only, e.g. Mail/Archive & Application searching, because companies using the FT Search Manager for Discovery/Compliance searching have specialised search requirements, saving even more time, as shown below in the Appendix.

Saving each user over 8 days per year is a huge efficiency improvement. And because the FT Search Manager has a once-only, per-user price between $3 - $13 per user (depending on volume), it's also a fantastic ROI.


Example
A company with 1000 users implements the FT Search Manager, with a total product cost (once-only), of $7750. After 1 year, they've saved 66,400 hours, or 8300 days.

That's the equivalent of adding another 33 employees. And at an average US salary of $48,000*, well over $1,000,000 in potential productivity gains.

And the great thing is, the same gains are made year after year.


This is achieved because more efficient search tools make much better use of your existing data. In this case it's our search tool, but it could be any.

For more information, demonstrations, or to set up a trial, please visit http://www.ionetsoftware.com/search.


* source: http://www.ofm.wa.gov/trends/economy/fig102.asp



Appendix: Specialist Searching
Survey responses received from companies using the FT Search Manager for Discovery/Compliance/Specialist searching;

"Well FT Search Manager is now an absolute 'must' for XXX. Because of the volume of data we have to split it across multiple databases. And what the users are searching for is the number of times a particular device failure for a specified device from a particular manufacturer has happened in the last n months. The results will be in a minimum of 2 Notes databases - active and relatively recently completed investigations. ......So they use it every day, a lot. Anything up to 40 people use it to process 250 - 300 reports a week. If it saves them 5 minutes per report then that would be up to 1500 minutes a week."

"It can save between 20 minutes a week to many hours. It is most useful as an administrator when I get asked to perform a legal discovery search where I can search for a string of words in a date range in 3000 odd email archives. I could not do this previously."

"For us, it's about how much time it saves each time we get an open records (Discovery) request. In the past it would take often several hours per request (about 4 requests per month). Now it takes a maximum of 30 minutes per request. The other benefit is that the search is consistent across mailboxes and the criteria can be printed for future reference."

"Our Legal department request me to do a search over a number of user's databases (incl archived mail ) and export all data to an external harddisk. I have done this several times and I could not have done this without the FT Search tool."

"What it did do at the time when we used it was save us 100's of man hours sifting through mail files and collating that into results"

Searching Within Results in the Notes Client

The latest version of the FT Search Manager allows you to 'Search Within Results' in the Notes Client.

This means that when searching your Mail & Archives, Applications, or performing Discovery/Compliance searching, you can search within the result set multiple times, and also back out each step (e.g. to change a search term, correct a typo etc).

Refining a search in this way makes it a lot easier to find target information.


 For example, a search of Mail & Archives for 'IBM', initially returns 2404 results;

 Then Search Within Results for 'partner*';

 Total now = 1492 results

 Search Within Results again for 'PWCS' (total now = 34 results) 

 Search Within Results again for 'signed' (total now = 9 results) 

 Search Within Results again for 'PSWWUA' (it's the wrong spelling, so no results) 

Therefore back out 1 level via the "Undo Search Within Results", to get back to the 'Signed' query (9 results). Note you can keep backing out the Search Within Results until you're back to your original query.

 Now Search Within Results again on the correct term 'PWSWUA' (total = 3 results) 

Proximity Operator
We've also added a NEAR proximity operator, which can be more accurate than AND.

 For example, a search for Mark AND Partner returns 90 results; 

 whereas a search for Mark NEAR Partner returns only 8 results; 

 'NEAR' is defined as being within 10 words, but you can also define that yourself, e.g. to 20 words

 You can also combine the NEAR operator with Search Within Results;

To try it yourself, please just download from http://www.ionetsoftware.com/search.

'Discovery-style' searching for Notes users

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 them to a Notes database.

This makes 'discovery-style' searching for users much easier, because they can search their local PC at the same time as Mail & Archives, find all relevant data (either in email or files), then 'process' it, e.g. copy it elsewhere, perhaps in response to a litigation request.

Shown below are the default processing options - you can easily customise or add your own.


1. Search (Notes Client)

2. Select Results (Notes Client). Note this OpenOffice document is within a ZIP file on the c: drive, yet you can see the contents quite easily.

3. Define ZIP handling.

4. Define File handling.

5. Specify File System copy location.

6. Specify Notes data copy location.

7. Processing Complete.

For more information, please visit the FT Search Manager page.

Free Notes Domain Search Extension

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 can now search the Domain Index using our product as below (you can change the logo, colours, fonts, labels etc)

and Browser

and get back more useful results in the Notes Client;

or Browser (including Tablet, Smartphone etc);

You can re-sort the results by column, export results and re-search, directly from the result pages.

Instead of getting a barely usable result set, you get much more useful search experience. For example;

• Seamlessly replace the standard Notes Domain Search.
• Configure the information returned per database, including the amount of summary data.
• Easily prevent 'rogue' documents from appearing in the result set, such as hidden or lookup documents.
• Control all aspects of the User Interface - Labels, Logos, Colours, Fonts, Font Sizes, Highlighting etc.
• Translate the UI to different languages - for example the Search button shown here is in Dutch.
• Click column headers to re-sort the result set.
• Search again using wider or narrower criteria.
• Export the result set via Notes or Browser.
• Take advantage of a host of other usability features, such as a web-style search syntax, many different user options, and just pressing Enter to search.

The result is Domain Searching as it should be - fast, easy, and powerful for both Notes Clients and Browsers, and most importantly, free.

Extend your Domain Search today, and make the most of your existing Notes infrastructure.

To download the Domain Search database and try it out, free of charge or obligation, please Click Here.
For information on other types of searching, please visit our FT Search Manager Page.
And for any other information or queries, please Contact Us.

*The Domain Search Extender is the only free component of the FT Search Manager, by default it does not include support or maintenance, and specific license conditions apply.

Speeding up Notes applications

Our FT Search Manager product (http://www.ionetsoftware.com/search) has been around for a while now, and being a search tool, we're always trying to increase it's search speed. The latest version (4.6 - sound familiar?) is a lot faster than previous versions - FYI here's a short YouTube demo showing the faster speed achieved http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFcxSQ8PaIM.

If anyone's interested, here are the main methods we used to speed it up;

1. Each multi-threaded search agent only populates up to the first page of results (e.g. 10 results if that's how many results are displaying per page) then writes it's full result set to a storage document. It only populates the first X results because that's the slow part - getting data from each document. The last agent to finish assembles all the results, re-sorts them, then presents them. The first couple of pages are already available, and the remaining stubs are then populated in the background, which means the first page displays in the shortest possible time.

2. Concatenating evaluate statements. We use fields & @formulas to return document data. If there are 4 fields & @formulas required, it's much faster to execute one evaluate statement, e.g. Evaluate(@formula1 : @formula2 : @formula3 : @formula4, NotesDocument), rather than repeating it 4 times.

3. Using NotesDocument.Save only when necessary.

4. Using NotesRichTextItem.GetUnformattedText instead of GetFormattedText.

5. Using Lists to store commonly used databases, views & variables.

6. Using the LS 'Split' function as much as possible.

7. Moving everything unnecessary out of loops.

8. Performing only one @DBLookup to get all required data in one operation, then splitting the results into separate fields.

9. Storing data in Profile documents and only retrieving new data if the relevant option changes.

Hopefully someone finds these points useful.

Loading file urls in the native application via Notes

When working on our File Indexing/Searching product, we noticed that when using a Notes Client to open HTML links to a url starting file://, the target file would open in the Browser, if the Browser was able to recognise the extension. What we wanted was the file to open in it's native application.

For example, a link to file://c:/test.pdf would load test.pdf in the default Browser, and not in Acrobat, even if Acrobat was installed on the PC.

After a lot of messing about we found that a malformed url will not be passed to the Browser (like a legacy hotspot link), but instead left to Notes to handle, and Notes obliges by loading the file in it's native application. 

For example you can mess up the url so that Windows doesn't think it's valid, but it still works in Notes, by appending a space then period at the end.

So a url like "file://c:/test.pdf ." (with a space then period at the end) will open the file in the native application, without loading the browser, which is what we wanted.