IBM  today announced IBM Ominfind Personal E-mail Search (or IOPES for short) for Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.  I downloaded and installed the Notes version which allows you to select local NSF files to be searched.  The install is a little quirky, for example right up front it warned to me shut down Notes and Sametime though neither were running at the time. Once the install completed it prompted me to select local databases to index I selected three local databases, my current mail file and two older archive databases after this step completed it launched Firefox and began the initialization process, the databases I selected were 550MB, and contain about 20,000 documents, the initialization process took about 10 minutes, but as you will see further down this was only initialization, indexing is not complete yet. The install also places a Firefox plugin on your desktop to install This installed the an Omnifind Search in my toobar Omnifind is now in the process of indexing my e-mails, I left the default setting as gentle, and it does not seem to be hurting performance on my machine. In addition to the search plugin, if you go to the search page you can specify keywords, as well as sender and recipients to search.  There is also a Tag feature, which I have not played with yet, but looks like you can build custom tags to find data that matches patterns, there are a few predefined tags (Phone Number, URL, Date, Time) and you can build your own. What I have not been able to find in the Press Release or on the Download Page are the system requirement for IOPES, obviously it requires Lotus Notes, and Firefox ( It does not seem to work in IE).  The system I installed it on is Windows XP running in VMware Workstation with 1 CPU and 512 MB of RAM.  I have Notes 8.0.1 Beta 1 Basic running in this VM.  Right now with the index running it is consuming about 200 MB of RAM, I expect when the index completes it will be using significantly less RAM.   The server it installs can be stopped, and started so you can let it build the initial index when it is convenient.   I will have to allow the index to complete, and then try out the search, I also have a few more archives I could add in as well ( yes I am somewhat of an e-mail pack rat, but once in a while it comes in handy), and will take a look at how fast the search is as well as how accurate.

I have been using Document Viewer from OpenNTF for a while now, today John Head posted about a new sidebar plug-in for Notes 8 which automatically displays the document properties, in a format that is much easier to read then natively in Notes.  John also provides excellent detailed instructions for installing the plug-in.  Here is a screen shot from my sidebar. Thanks John and “Mr Frunobulax” One interesting note, I originally tried to install this from my office where I require a proxy to get out to the internet,  when I tried to update, it could not find any updates, when I came home and tried it immediately found and installed the plug-in, this makes me believe that the plug-in install engine does not read the proxy setting from the location doc (other sidebar plug-ins do not honor the location document settings either).   I will have to do a little more testing on this.

Chris reminded me the other day that Notes 8 Basic configuration contains the Nomad functionality allowing it to be installed on a USB drive.  So I decided to download the basic client and replaced my Notes 7.0.2 with 8.0 on my USB Drive.  In 7.0.2 the install would only put down the client, not administrator or designer (there was a hack to copy down nadmin.,exe and ndesign.exe to get them to work though).  I downloaded the Basic install for all clients (Part number C13NEEN) and ran the install

setup /a /v"NOMAD=1 TARGETDIR=F: /qb+"

and it installed the Notes Client, including Admin and Design.  When running off of the USB key which I don’t do that often, I don’t think I will miss the Standard client.  I tried out the built in IM client, it is not really improved from Notes 7, but it does let me see external buddies through the gateway, I can’t add new ones, but can see and chat with my existing external contacts.  Like I said I don’t really have the need to use the install on the USB stick to often, but it has saved the day on more then one occasion.   So what else do I carry on a stick? Mainly stuff downloaded from PortableApps,  I have installed 7-zip, Filezilla, Firefox, OpenOffice, Putty, and Pidgin (which used to be called GAIM Portable) for IM.  Pidgin supports most IM platforms, including Sametime. Any other suggestions for useful portable apps? Let me know.