SharePoint Search Admin v.06: Support 250K Lotus Notes Databases Now

http://www.codeplex.com/searchadmin

We all know that SharePoint 2007 and Microsoft Search Server 2008 support Lotus Notes content source. So we can index the databases on Domino Servers.

Y-E-S. But there ARE some issue you may face in the real world.

The original idea of SharePoint Search Admin (or MOSS Search Admin, MSA) comes from a customer request in Australia. They wanted to deal with Domino Document Manager, and they had thousands of Notes DBs to index. But in SharePoint Search Settings page, you need to manually add all these Notes dbs one by one. So I wrote MSA to batch add all these DBs.

But later, I found MSA can solve many problems when you work on enterprise search solutions built on SharePoint, for example some troubleshooting work, provide some workaround to bugs... It's more and more useful, especially in large Notes envoriment.

We will talk about the problems later, now we will only discuss this update.

Yesterday a issue happened in my customer envoriment. After they created 500 content sources for 500 Notes DBs, they cannot create any new content sources any more.

Okay, there's a 500 limit in content source per SSP. This is okay for file share and websites, because we can have 500 start address per content source. But things are very tough in Notes content source, you can only have ONE Notes DB per content source if you are using default content source creation page!

This made me crazy. We always have thousands of DBs to index, but now we can only index 500 of them. Customer don't want to have multiple SSPs.

Thanks to our great Mitch Prince, he immediately shed the light on me: Using OM.

In fact, SharePoint Lotus Notes content source can support multiple DB/Directory in single content source. The only reason we cannot do it OOB is: that Content source creation page are really poorly made. This can be workaround by using object model, exactly how MSA did.

Damn, how can I forget my own tool?

So I added this in MSA. It's quite simple, just a single line of code.

LotusNotesCS.StartAddresses.Add(startAddress);

So now you can add up to 250,000 Lotus Notes DBs in one SSP! Well, if you are sure you won't hit our performance barrier.

What about the future? In next major release of SharePoint Search Admin, I'll complete reorganize the UI, and add more useful functions to make it a powerful alternative to SharePoint Search Setting UI. Hope I can did better than System Center!