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.
