Configure the FAST Search Lotus Notes content connector

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Applies to: FAST Search Server 2010

To set up a basic configuration, copy the file lotusnotestemplate.xml that you can find in the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint installation etc folder, typically located in C:\FASTSearch\etc. Give the copied file a new unique name, for example MyLotusNotesContentConfig.xml, and configure it for your environment in an XML editor of your choice. The configuration file should be stored in UTF-8 format. Place the new file back in the \etc directory after configuration.

Basic configuration parameters

The following table lists several parameters from this file that are used to set up a basic configuration. The two parameters in the Connection group are required to get started. If these parameters are set, the content connector will crawl everything on the server and feed the content to the default content collection that is named sp.

Parameter group Parameter Description

Connection

Hostname

Enter the host name of the Domino server.

This can be a host name, a fully qualified domain name or "localdisk".

The reserved keyword "localdisk" instructs the connector to look for databases on the local Lotus Notes client.

Connection

Password

Copy the encrypted password that is used to authenticate to the Lotus Notes client.

This must match the password that you last used to log on to the Lotus Notes Client on this computer. The password must be encrypted, encrypt it with the connectorpwgen.bat utility.

See the section Encrypt passwords for more information.

Encrypt passwords

  1. Verify that you meet the following minimum requirements: You are a member of the FASTSearchAdministrators local group on the computer where FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint is installed.

  2. On the Start menu, click All Programs.

  3. Click Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.

  4. Click the Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint shell.

  5. At the Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint shell command prompt, type the following command:

    connectorpwgen.bat

  6. Enter the password that you want to encrypt twice.

    Warning

    The encryption/decryption key depends on the user who performs the encryption/decryption. The user who will run the connector must run the connectorpwgen.bat tool.

  7. Copy the password (without including any new lines or white spaces) and paste it into Notepad. Remove the new line character and starting text.

  8. Copy the password from Notepad to the appropriate parameter in the configuration file.

The following table lists more parameters that, although not required for the content connector to run, could be useful to specify:

Parameter group Parameter Description

Filters

DataBase

A list of database paths to crawl. May contain view names. Separate multiple databases with a semicolon (;).

Example: mail\user1.nsf;help\help_client.nsf

Specify a view in the format: <database path>#viewname.

When you specify a view, only the search formula of the view is used.

XMLExport

ExportToXML

Set to true or false. If set to true, exports all items to XML.

This parameter is used only for debugging, and should generally not be used.

ConnectorExecution

Workfolder

Specifies the work folder (either a relative or absolute file path) for all file output, such as log files and XML output files.

The folder is automatically created if it does not exist.

Multiple connector configurations should have different values for this parameter.

ConnectorExecution

NumAdapters

Specifies how many databases the connector should crawl in parallel.

Increasing this value may increase performance of the connector but it will also increase memory consumption.

StateTracker

PurgeAtStart

Set to true or false. If set to true, all data in the state tracker tables is purged at startup, telling the connector to retrieve everything, even if it was crawled previously.

Use when testing your configuration. Set to false when in production.

Tuning your configuration

There are several parameters in the content connector configuration that can be used to tune the behavior, such as performance, memory consumption, and the load exerted on the Domino server or the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint back-end.

The following table lists the configuration parameters that affect the behavior of the content connector and describes how they affect it:

Parameter group Parameter Description

Filters

MaxAttachmentSize

This size filter enables you to define the maximum size of Lotus Notes attachments that you want to crawl. Increasing the value of this filter will, if you have larger attachments, cause the memory consumption of the content connector to increase. This is because a copy of the attachment is kept in memory.

It will also cause crawl performance (documents per second) to drop, because more time will be spent extracting the large attachments from Domino in addition to converting and indexing them.

Decreasing the value for this parameter will have the opposite effect, but large attachments will not be searchable.

ConnectorExecution

QueueSize

This is the size of the internal memory queue of documents that have been extracted from Domino but are waiting to be submitted for indexing.

Increasing this value may in some cases (but not all) increase performance at the cost of increased memory consumption in the content connector.

ConnectorExecution

NumAdapters

This parameter specifies how many Lotus Notes databases should be processed in parallel.Increasing this parameter is likely to have a positive effect on extraction rate.

However, if the bottleneck is the indexing back-end, scaling up on the extraction side is unlikely to help. In fact, it is likely to cause internal queues to fill up so that the content connector uses more memory.

Increasing the number of threads also causes the connector to use more memory.

ConnectorExecution

AdapterThrottleSleepMS

This parameter says how many milliseconds the connector should sleep between each document that it extracts from Domino.

This is a way to throttle the extraction rate if it is necessary.

You would typically not use this parameter, as the connector does not add a significant load on the Domino server.

You should first consider reducing the parameter ConnectorExecution/NumAdapters before you use this parameter to throttle the connector.

ConnectorExecution

EnableStatustracker

Set to true or false to turn document level status tracking on or off.

If you do not want to monitor the state of individual documents, set this parameter to false.

Setting this parameter to false will relieve the state database (SQL Server) from some additional traffic, as the connector will insert one row per document in a status table. This table also contributes to the overall size of the state database.

See Also

Reference

connectorpwgen.bat reference

Concepts

lotusnotestemplate.xml reference
Crawling Lotus Notes content with the FAST Search Lotus Notes connector