Exchange Server
In Situations where the success of certain projects is depending on a number of participants, it is important that all information is highly available and without redundancy.
For many years companies use the so called groupware in such matters. Groupware is supposed to alleviate the working process in the teams and enable the project coordination on a timely and spacial basis. One of the most famous exponents of the groupware application is the Microsoft exchange server.
The Microsoft exchange server offers a wide spectrum of functions which allow a various number of operators to use different systems to work in cooperation together.
The most often used features of exchange servers are:
-E-Mails
-Appointments and calendars
-Tasks
-Contacts and addresses
-Notes
-Documents
All of the above mentioned elements are stored on a central server and are made available to a user-defined number of operators. Therefore the information’s are always without redundancy and up to date.
The benefit of this architecture is obvious.
Let’s assume, that you have a support section in your company and use for the contact address support@yourcompany.com an exchange inbox. Now all of your associates can see, which E-Mails have already been answered, what cases still wait for a reply and they can even see the proposal for solutions that have been made.
But the working day has changed a lot in the past years. May it be that projects are realized at the customer’s location, companies use more and more outwork or that companies have structures reaching around the entire world.
Security: Encryption with VPN
Users from outside the company network can offer their knowledge and participate through the so called VPN (Virtual Private Network). This ensures that the participants of projects always are provided with information’s up to date and without redundancy.
Using the online mode you work within the infrastructure of your company and adjust information’s in real time with your system. If the connection to the company network is disabled, you just turn your exchange server into the offline mode. This creates a copy of your inbox, which in turn allows you to still have fast access to your data.
This copy of your inbox is regularly updated by the mail server when you are online. Once the connection is enabled again, Microsoft Outlook will switch back into the online mode. Changes made by you, while there was no connection to the server, are automatically adjusted as soon as the connection is enabled again.
Of course the synchronization of the worldwide data is a challenge for the exchange server. For example, if an operator uses a cell phone and has an UMTS connection, an adjustment of large files would take way to long.
Therefore Microsoft uses the so called “cached mode” since the exchange server 2003. In the cached mode, the exchange application possesses an automatic online/offline-management, which is running in the background. This equilibrates the encumbrance of the connection to the exchange server because some of the contents aren’t aligned despite the connection to the exchange server is established.
Bulletin boards and product reviews that are dealing with search tools, often complain about the fact that most tools aren’t able to search and index all exchange inboxes in all modes.
Especially for this case of application, and for a professional environment in general, Lookeen was developed.
We at Axonic Informationsdienste GmbH are aware of the fact, that the base principle of development for Lookeen is the compatibility to exchange servers.
After the release of Lookeen the feedback is thoroughly positive and a huge amount of encouragement reached us. All involved in this dialogue profited of it.
Companies used the smooth support of exchange servers as the reason for choosing Lookeen over other search tools.
Archives or inboxes that are on the exchange servers are simply added in the Lookeen options and because of the Lookeen terms of references, we spoke about in a previous article, all particulars of the handling of the exchange servers and their clients can be individually configured.
Lookeen supports the exchange server indication in all modes, no matter if you are online or offline, if you are using the cached or the uncached mode. With Lookeen you search through all of your data in a few seconds, even on your exchange servers.
We set a high value on making the installation of Lookeen as easy and flexible as possible. This is no problem for single-user-installations: You run the setup.exe, choose a path and after that Lookeen will already be installed.
When you run Outlook after that, the Lookeen-Wizard will help you to add the desired mailboxes to the index and then you will already be able to use Lookeen on your workstation.
Above that Lookeen helps your company to fight the constantly increasing flood of emails.
For the installation within a company’s environment (regardless whether it concerns 20 or 20,000 workstations), flexibility is a decisive factor. In this case, the introduction of a fundamental tool like Lookeen naturally has to be planned well and in a structured way.
The system administrator has to find out which network resources are required for that and which settings or rather restrictions have to be made for the individual users.
The administrator regulates these settings and restrictions with the help of the so-called “Group Policies” (“GPOs” in short).
These group policies are totally indispensable for the integration in a company’s environment.
Sadly not all programmes and tools support group policies. This is why the most successful website in the field of group policies (www.gruppenrichtlinien.de) introduced the TROST-prize („Tja, Rein Optisch Schönes Tool“-prize; which means a prize for a tool which only seems to be good but it is not if you look at it more closely): A “prize” for programmes, which do not function with restricted user authorisations and do not support GPOs.
Therefore we have known from the beginning: In order to make it possible to “roll-out” Lookeen companywide, Lookeen group policies have to be developed. This amount of work should not be underestimated.
The required efforts and especially the error sources caused in a company without group policies are simply unacceptable.
The installation itself is only a part of the integration (of the roll-out) in a company. Afterwards the workstations have to be set up in a personnel-suitable way.
Assuming that you have just installed the software on 500 workstations, hopefully without any problems, the software is not just yet ready to be used only because the installation has been completed. To be honest: Do you want to make sure afterwards that the new software works properly and can be used efficiently when 500 employees with completely different backgrounds and expertise use it?
The administrator is able to control for example the following points with the help of GPOs:
- The including of shared index sources
- The periods of times during which Lookeen indexes the data stock
- The adding of outlook archives, local folders and network folders
- The handling of automatic updates
We, the Lookeen-team, have been engaged in the development of GPOs for a long time and in an extensive way. However, it was worth the time and efforts. Thus this precisely makes Lookeen today so desirable and comfortable for a lot of companies and their system administrators, regarding the central controlling.
At this point we would like to thank our customers very much! We have been actively supported by you with ideas and technical implementations since the initial stage of the GPOs.
Eventually it was one of our long-time partners, who provided us with an administrative template (ADM-File).
Down to the present day, the Lookeen GPOs have proved themselves in a multitude of companies and have been continuously enhanced.
Lookeen has been supporting the feature group policies since version 1.3 – whereas by now altogether more than 50 GPOs setting options exist, like e.g. suppression of the wizard, explicit control regarding the different exchange modes, options adjustable ON/OFF, shared index path and many more…
If you also plan to use Lookeen in your company or if you have questions regarding group policies or ADM-files, please send us an email to info@lookeen.com.
Everyone protects the Environment: Lookeen even protects your Network: Central Indexing made easy!
Just imagine that your Customer Care Center keeps records on all support cases. These records are stored in a central place, a document is allocated to each support case and the corresponding email is linked with it.
Now you can decide in which way you want to make this information accessible for all employees of the CCC. After you have done that, everyone can browse for the corresponding information in a network folder. With the help of Lookeen, you can also index every user of the network drive in order to ensure in this way that everything which is searched for will be found immediately.
But why should 20 users index the same data 20 times? This burdens your network and requires extra time and resources.
Based on this question, we, the Lookeen-team, developed the “shared index”. The concept of the shared index sources includes a central index, which is accessible for all users. The advantages are obvious:
- Every user has the same data status
- The index only has to be created and renewed at one place
Here is another scenario which customers often tell us about:
A multitude of email-archives exists. In order to preserve Outlook’s high performance and user friendliness, naturally those archives shall not be included into the work profile.
This is no problem when using Lookeen:
Simply create a new outlook profile. Afterwards you can add any number of archives to this profile. Lookeen will index the archives in this profile from that moment on. Now you can add this created index as shared index source to your work profile. After you have done that, each query will also include the indexed archives and each indexed object can also be opened and relocated easily by using Lookeen.
Lookeen 2.0 Release beginning of 2009
Central Indexing of jointly used Outlook data within the company – this is the new Lookeen Shared Index. Normally each user has a personal index for his data. However, it can really be very useful to not only have a personal index but also to search additionally in several external Lookeen-Indexes.
Assuming that there exist a lot of public documents in the network of a company or a lot of big public files, which are to be browsed by many users, on an exchange-server, normally each user would have to bear the responsibility to index these data himself.
However, this increases the network traffic in an undesired way and at the same time it burdens the user’s computer and costs precious working time.
Lookeen 2.0 will be released in the first quarter of 2009 – be prepared for the new Shared Index and a lot of new amazing features!
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