Outlook Search
Early in the year 2008 the company Axonic Informationssysteme GmbH released Outlook add-on Lookeen. This tool has made searching in Outlook easy for thousands of users in over 70 countries worldwide. Lookeen is searching through local mailboxes, exchange server, public folder or the intranet in a very clearly laid out and efficient manner. The new version 3.7 contains besides a full 64-bit compatibility, advancements in the handling and a quick load button for files, a brand new feature as beta version: the real time indexing.
To find files faster, means to work more productive
For self employed persons, for teams and of course whole companies, the data structure on the computer, in the network, even in the own Outlook mailbox constantly changes. Mails and files being added, edited, moved or deleted. This happends so fast, that only a programm can keep up with it. Thanks to the new real time indexing, Lookeen is able to find mails and others files in real time. “Let’s say an associate creates a new bill and saves it in the network. Right away after it was saved, Lookeen enables all other associates to find the bill, to search through it and to work with it, because the change was instantly registered in the index.” explains CEO Martin Welker.
The real time indexing therefore constantly delivers the files up to date to all Lookeen users – no matter if they are on exchange servers, in public folders, on Citrix or Terminal Server surroundings or in the network. This means especially for companies an essential gain in efficiency and productivity. Axonic GmbH is planning to release the final full version of the real time indexing within this year as an upgrade to the already existing version.
The version is available as a free download
On demand the real time indexing included in the beta version can be disabled as well. The programm will then search as usual through and for Emails and files, still offering the improved performance and handling of the new version. “Many companies that use Lookeen are testing currently the beta version with the real time indexing. But not everyone wants to try out a beta version, so these companies just use the programms new improvements” tells Martin Welker.
For established Lookeen users the new version will be free of charge. Interested parties can test the program for 14 days in a free of charge trial version. The software can be downloaded at www.lookeen.net/downloads/.
Also free of charge: Axonic’s click.to for Outlook. With just one click you can add copied text or attachments to any new mail. (Wikipedia: click.to).
Over the last years, e-mail inevitably became the most often used internet-service worldwide. The Cisco 2008 Annual Security Report states that, around the globe, the incredibly high amount of 220 billion e-mails are sent and received on a daily basis. Based on the vast number of e-mails, every user is confronted with a sheer, flood like, e-mail chaos – also on a daily basis. At least if one does not use the small but excellent search expert for Outlook, named Lookeen.
The board of the Annual Security Report estimates the number of globally sent e-mails by reference to the figures of e-mail users and active e-mail accounts. Following new estimations the spiking amount of 220 billion e-mails will in fact double within the next years, due to the growing importance of social-media channels. In practice results are as follows: the average user receives an average of 150 e-mails a day. No matter if the concerning e-mail account is used for private or business purposes.
Faster, more precisely, more comfortable
The needed time to sort out and separate spam from relevant and important e-mails can easily add up to several hours. Searching for the wanted e-mail or attachment not included. To avoid that unnecessary waste of time only a quick glance on Lookeen is necessary and worthwhile. The installation of the add-on for Microsoft Outlook takes only a moment and pays out immediately, by putting an end to the endless searches. After the installation of Lookeen only a short indexing of the data is necessary to search mail-folders and -archives faster, more precisely and more comfortable than ever before. Even e-mail folders in the most remote network drive are included in the Lookeen based search. To Lookeen the amount of data is absolutely indifferent. All it takes to get it started is a search entry in the search mask. At a record time any information you want will be delivered to you, no matter if e-mail, attachment or both combined – neatly arranged, central and ready to hand. The final highlight is the convenient preview that allows you as a user to look at the contents of and read every data file without opening it.
The business day of the future therefore can be re-modelled into a more relaxed version that is free of negative stress and unenjoyable useless labor – at least if Lookeen is put to use. You will never miss an e-mail again, over are the days of data loss – no matter if document, table or picture – and overwrought nerves.
The new Lookeen 2010 is available now
We would like to invite you to see for yourself the quality as well as the performance of the new Lookeen 2010.
Get your free trial version* here:
http://www.lookeen.net/downloads/
By creating Lookeen 2010, we developed the search tool of the next generation. Your advantage: Due to the new features of Lookeen 2010, you will be able to find information even quicker, easier and in a more efficient way.
*For users who have Lookeen licences of the versions 1.x and 2.x, the upgrade will be available for an attractive price amounting to 19.90 €. Simply use our upgrade-centre to download the upgrade:
http://www.lookeen.net/download/UpgradeCenter_en.php
The purchase price of the full version is still 34.90 €.
Lookeen 2.3 is available – free update!
After an exhausting but fruitful stage of development, last week it was finally so far – the new version Lookeen 2.3 has been released.
In the development, our attention was this time focused, to meet customer requirements and to implement some new features. The participants in the beta phase were impressed by the performance and the speed of the new Lookeen 2.3.
As always, we’ve fixed some bugs and added new features.
Here are the most important facts:
- Improving the search with the *- operator
- Improved search results
- Index now faster
- A simplified and more stable handling with Group Policies
- Improved stability and performance on Windows 7
- Additional Feature: Lookeen remembers the last opened tab
- Additional Feature: Lookeen starts the index delayed to the start of Outlook (performance gain)
- Additional Feature: Search without a local index is possible now
Overall, the new 2.3.1.1242 Lookeen offers a variety of enhancements and improvements. Make yourself a picture and try Lookeen 14 days for free.
As also announced in the previously Newsletter of Lookeen, the version 2.3.1.1242 will be a prerequisite for future updates. Therefore the update remains free for customers of Lookeen 1.x and 2.x versions.
We would like to take this opportunity to address ourselves to the selected group of customers, our friends and acquaintances who have supported us during the beta phase. Thank you for your engaged assistance and your suggestions that help us to improve Lookeen steadily and purposefully.
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.
Lookeen is a Desktop Search!
On a daily basis, we, the Lookeen-team, receive calls and emails from customers all over the world, who tell us how convinced they are by Lookeen and how much they would like to have a similar tool for their folder structure in Windows.
A lot of Windows users have already noticed the benefits of a desktop search and took advantage of it. However, you do not need additional tools to browse your desktop – because the function of a complete desktop search is already included in Lookeen.
You just have to add the desired folder by using the Lookeen options. After you have done that, Lookeen will also index all folders in Windows and provide a full text search for the most common file types, like for instance:
- Microsoft Office Word (.doc, .docx)
- Microsoft Office Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
- Microsoft Office PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx)
- Adobe Portable (.pdf)
- Websites (.htm, .html)
- PHP-files (.php)
- Extensible Markup Language (.xml)
- Richtext files (.txt, .rtf)
Have you already been wondering a lot of times where the individual information is exactly stored? On which server you can find the desired document? Was this file shared in the network by Mr. Meier – or by Mr. Schmidt?
This is no problem for Lookeen. You can also add an unlimited number of network resources or complete servers in order to access the required information quickly and easily.
Whatever you need – Lookeen will find it for you!
The communication in the business world has changed fundamentally during the past ten years. While the main sales channels in the past were written correspondence and telephone calls, now the email has achieved the highest significance.
Every year, more than 77 billion emails are sent via the internet in Germany alone. This means that each employee sends and receives on average 180 emails per day. (source: dpa).
Lots of these emails contain important information concerning the wide variety of business processes. Therefore it is obligatory to archive the corresponding emails. According to a survey from Absolit® Consulting, the number of archived emails has already been 4,700 on average per workplace in 2003.
After the messages have vanished within personal folders or in archive servers, it becomes difficult and costs time to find them again. However, in many cases it is the existing correspondence, email attachments or documentation, which constitutes the decisive success in business transactions. A possibility to find this data again in a quick and uncomplicated way is therefore so very important.
Due to the index of Lookeen, all information will be presented to you within a few seconds. Simply search for distinctive keywords or let all objects connected to a contact be displayed.
With Lookeen you will find – instead of search!
Lookout – an Obituary
Lookout for Outlook is surely still well known by a lot of people. The small tool ranked among the most important add-ons for Microsoft Outlook some time ago.
The Microsoft Outlook users have been wishing for an extended and fast search function since the first version was launched. Public folders as well as exchange mailboxes have to be browsed. It is not effective enough to only browse the current folder – instead it also has to be possible to select the simultaneous browsing of all folders. The search results have to be available immediately, also in case of a great data volume. Lookout was therefore the solution for thousands of customers who have recognized the surplus value of such an index search.
Hereby Lookout uses the well-known open source project Lucene. Lucene is considered to be one of the best and fastest search libraries in the world and is provided by the Apache Software Foundation. With the help of its existing version at that time, Lucene 1.4, Lookout was able to stabilize and optimize the compare functions.
It was a profitable and successful business for Lookout to enrich Microsoft Outlook by extended search functions. This fact makes Microsoft’s strategic decision to buy Lookout up and to integrate it into Microsoft’s own company in 2003 even more understandable. However, it seemed that this resulted in a development stop and the end of the support for Lookout. Lookout was developed for Mircosoft Outlook 2003 in .NET Framework 1.0. The consequence was that Lookout was left out for a multitude of Outlook users when they switched to Outlook 2007.
At the time Outlook 2007 was launched, the Axonic Informationssyteme GmbH was developing the social networking tool Chilibase. It was Chilibase’s aim to identify connections between contact persons, emails and email contents and to edit them in order to increase the workflow in the email environment.
Chilibase was launched on the market at the same time when Outlook 2007 was starting to push the previous version more and more away. Chilibase made it possible for the former users of Lookout to compensate the omission of Lookout. However, during conversations with customers it became more and more apparent that the users simply missed Lookout’s search function and did not found an adequate alternative. Without any doubt the end of Lookout left a gap for a lot of companies and private users.
Inspired by the customers, the Axonic GmbH started a corresponding market analyses at the end of the summer 2007. The Axonic GmbH quickly came to the doubtless conclusion that there has to be an alternative to Lookout. The advantages of a quick, smart and easy to handle index search established themselves too well to forgo it.
This was Lookeen’s hour of birth. Up to now, Lookeen has established itself as THE alternative to Lookout throughout several versions. We have tried to continuously adapt Lookeen to the wishes of the customers and to improve it. At this Lookeen is also supported by the newest versions of Lucene, which are also used by a lot of internet search engines and Wikipedia.
The waiting is over: Lookeen 2.0 will be released at March 11th 2009. The update for customers who had already bought Lookeen 1.x licenses is for free.
New customers: Although there are amazing new features in Lookeen 2.0 – the price will stay the same!
Lookeen customers are able to use the build in updater feature. Or just go online (at March 11th) to: www.lookeen.com and download the version and reinstall it.
New search features in Lookeen 2.0
As Axonic Informationssysteme GmbH has announced yesterday, the at beginning of 2009 available Lookeen version 2.0 will have a new helpful feature: The Extended Search Fields.
In order to make complex searches in Outlook easy, you can use the extended search fields in the Lookeen search result window. Now you’re able to restrict your search quickly and easily without using long self-made search queries.
With the help of this extended search fields you’re able to search e.g. directly just in your Outlook contacts for a person. Or restrict your search to mails having only PDF attachments! Are you searching for mails in a specific span of time – with Lookeen 2.0 no problem!
Certainly the fields can be combined – for example: search for a search term within a range of date in an attachment of a special kind of file type (e.g. doc) received from a wished sender!
Complex search queries will just take a few seconds – and the handling will stay intuitively, too!
Do you have a sales question? Contact us at 315-352-0745 US/CA
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