Fabasoft Mindbreeze and Its Lotus Connector
March 18, 2010
I was able to read a white paper prepared by Fabasoft Mindbreeze about its updated Mindbreeze IBM Lotus Connector. The document is “Configuration of Mindbreeze Enterprise Search for IBM Lotus” and is available from the company. When I worked at Ziff Communications in New York City, I had an early exposure to the product. Since that time 20 years ago, Lotus Notes has found its way into many commercial and governmental entities. Those who love the product cannot live without it. People like me tolerate some of the system’s peculiarities exemplified by this question, “Why can’t you restore my email?”
Fabasoft is the successful Austria-based enterprise software and integration company. Mindbreeze is its search, content analytics and content processing subsidiary. The Mindbreeze engineers have developed a solution for organizations with Lotus Domino/Notes as well as a lot of other types of content systems. You can get Mindbreeze and its Lotus Domino/Notes support, snap it into your environment, and search for Notes content, even in mobile environments, including the RIM Blackberry, Apple iPhone, and Google Android devices.
In January 2010, I got a preview of the system and I received a copy of the white paper. I followed up with Daniel Fallmann, founder and managing director of Mindbreeze. Here’s what I learned in an email exchange on March 14 and 15, 2010:
What is the main focus of the IBM Lotus Domino/Notes support you offer?*
What is very important for us is that that the Mindbreeze Connectors run with a minimum of required configuration, even to very large scale. So Notes items and even complex Lotus Domino object models are very easy to adapt to fulfill the need of the customer/users. So Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise makes it easy to search-enable any line-of-business application based on IBM Lotus Domino within a minimum amount of time with great results for the knowledge workers, even with their mobile information needs. Of course our customers get all the needed social search and federated search features built-in. We have a lot of Lotus partners that love the ease you can now search-enable IBM Lotus line-of-business applications.
As we offer an appliance as well you can buy the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance or you can install Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise and run the IBM Lotus Connector on a Linux environment which totally saves you the money of the operating system and enables you to even support our customer’s users with IBM Lotus line-of-business-application in the cloud with a modest and easy to calculate investment.
What is the method for indexing Lotus Mail which has been moved to an archive?*
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise follows the “link-information” (for example, a link to an archived mail for example in a Fabasoft iArchive for IBM Lotus Notes) left in the remaining item stub and index the archived information by applying the rights based on the stub object that’s left in the IBM Lotus installation.
How are emails across Lotus Notes installations indexed so that only the authorized person can see a single email or a group of emails?
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise uses the rights based on an IBM Lotus object information to evaluate if a user has the right to read information based on the document level or even extensible to the field level. Things like inherited rights and user name fields are as well taken into account. As Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is based on a modern distributed service architecture, it is easy to spread queries against several instances and respond to a user’s query. Thanks to our innovative technology and architecture we typically are up and running at customers in between 30min and 2 days, of course this highly varies on the customer’s needs.
When Lotus Notes is used with an IBM collaboration tool like Lotus Notes Traveler, how are the indexes federated so a single query retrieves the content across the Notes’s components?
First: It typically makes sense that Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise crawler, filter, index services are located where the information is, so the best practice is to use the distributed architecture of Mindbreeze Enterprise Search to bring together information from several IBM Lotus databases. Second: As Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise connects against the IBM Lotus web services it is even trivial to get information from different locations and index it in a central location.
How does your system’s pricing work?
We have a per named user pricing model as well as a concurrent use model that is very easy to calculate and use. Moreover the Mindbreeze IBM Lotus Connector supports custom object models as well and you can host the whole product on a Linux platform. As far as I know there is no other IBM Lotus Connector and search product, that can so easy adapt to IBM Lotus Domino object models for your specific line-of-business application. This of course has to be taken into account.
Do you support the Notes – Cisco Unified Meeting Place?
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise allows you to index all the calendar information for all meetings that you are invited to by Cisco’s Unified Meeting Place. This information can be updated in the index during the meeting place notification mechanisms. You could even index the audio content streamed via a Cisco MeetingPlace Audio Server by using speech to text functionality.
If you want to index Lotus content, we think the Mindbreeze solution warrants a test drive. Contact the company at http://www.mindbreeze.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2010
When I am next in Linz, Mindbreeze promised me a pastry. Until then, this is an uncompensated post.
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