With more and more information becoming available to organisations, generated either internally or via the Web, the demand is growing for applications that can search mountains of data for timely, relevant, business intelligence.
With this in mind, the local office of software developer, Lotus Development, has confirmed the release of Lotus Domino Extended Search (DES) Release 3.0 that will allow users to search and retrieve documents from repositories that include Lotus Notes 4.X and 5.X, Domino.Doc and R5 Domain Index.
Lotus Domino Extended Search (DES) Release 3.0 is an add-on product to Domino that provides distributed, heterogeneous searching across Notes/Domino domains, legacy data stores, and the Internet - without the user having to know the details of these various systems.
"The result is single-point of access, from Web browsers or Lotus Notes, to a variety of data sources without requiring a new, central index," says Lesego Tlhabanelo, marketing communications manager at Lotus Development SA.
DES also searches external sources such as Microsoft Index Server and Site Server, LDAP-compliant directories, 18 popular Web search sites and News sites, commercial content providers, and relational databases such as IBM DB2, Oracle, Sybase, MS SQL-Server and other ODBC compliant databases. "With DES 3.0 an intranet becomes the nexus for information access - increasing productivity, while making more data available to everyone than ever before," he says.
According to Tlhabanelo, Release 3.0 demonstrates the ongoing, rapid evolution of the Extended Search product and addresses requests from many customers including:
Removed Domino dependency;Configuration data now stored in IBM`s DB2 Universal Database; Improved enterprise scalability (supports a greater number of sources and concurrent clients);
Improved access control (limit results based on user`s permission);
More flexible data model; and New Links - for additional data source types.
In addition to the functional enhancements in Extended Search R3.0 there has been a significant emphasis on improving scalability and performance. "The Extended Search team has been working with a number of customers deploying Extended Search on a large scale, and has used these experiences to both enhance the product and improve our documentation on implementing larger solutions. One aspect of this is the shift to using DB2 for the configuration data, which provides improved performance and capacity," he explains.
Extended Search provides an enterprise with the ability to access data from a wide range of sources. This accessibility must, in many cases, be controlled to ensure that only authorised content is available to each qualified user of the Extended Search system. Extended Search R3.0 offers improved security in several key areas.
There is tightened up enforcement of field usage restrictions (search against, retrieve, fetch). Links to Notes, ODBC sources, Domino.Doc and Web have an option to use the requester`s UserID to connect to data sources; this ensures users only see data for those documents they have access to. Exit points are provided for additional validation of user info and to modify user id`s as required for mapping, where a person may have different IDs for different data sources.
Additional Extended Search Key Features and Benefits include:
Search in parallel across heterogeneous data sources;
Save, re-use and share searches (available for the Notes client only);
View shared searches to identify people with similar interests;
Web HTML templates for easy customisation; and
DES Link Toolkit for creating customised links and Solutions
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