Crawl Lotus Domino with Lotus Notes Connector in SharePoint Server 2010

The Lotus Notes Protocol Handler has been changed to Lotus Notes Connector in SharePoint 2010 products. The good thing is, now Lotus Notes Connector has its own Service and Service Application. It is working on x64 platform, supporting Lotus Domino 5.5~8.5. And the UI as been improved a lot. So here’re the steps to configure Lotus Notes search in SharePoint Server 2010. It also applies to Search Server 2010.

Prepare Lotus Notes Client

I’m assuming the reader has basic Lotus Notes administrator knowledge. If not, don’t worry – follow the instructions in Notes Setup and TechNet article and you may still succeed.

This guide is done with Lotus Domino and Notes 8.5. The steps with earlier versions are the same.

Make sure Lotus Notes Client has been installed on the SharePoint box you want to use as an indexer.

Suggestion: use C:\Lotus\Notes as installation directory so you won’t miss it. The installer in Notes 8.5 32bit has some issues with “(x86)” and messed up my program files directory on x64 OS.

If you need to make mappings file from this machine, Domino Designer is also needed. Domino Administrator can be an option.

After installation, double click Notes icon to launch it and go through connection setup. make sure it can connect to the Domino Server you want to crawl.

Setup Lotus Notes Connector on SharePoint Server

1. In Farm Configuration Wizard, make sure Lotus Notes Connector is selected and click Next. This will create the service and applications.

2. In System Settings, click Manage services on server.

3. Click Start on Lotus Notes Connector

4. So now it tells you there’re couple of steps you need to follow before provisioning the service. Don’t click Provision now, step 5-10 are required.

5. Download Lotus Notes C++ API 3.0 (not 3.0i) from IBM. The link may change as IBM updates their website quite often and breaks outside links. Make sure to download the one for Windows.

6. Get lcppn30.dll from the package and copy it to x:\program files\microsoft office servers\14.0\bin and x:\lotus\notes (your notes installation directory).

7. Go to x:\program files\microsoft office servers\14.0\bin\1033 (1033 is LCID for US English.  The folder name may be different for other languages. For example, zh-cn is 2052), run NotesSetup.exe. Make sure the account to run NotesSetup.exe is the same with the one you use to start the Lotus Notes Connector Service.

8. Okay, this is the same one in 2007. Put in your Lotus Notes path like the following. Password is the one of the account you want to use for crawl.  If you want to have security trimming with search result, click next. Otherwise you can check Ignore Lotus Notes security while building an index option, skip step 9 and finish setup.

9. Fill in server name, account mappings db name, view name and column title in the dialogue. For how to create this mapping file, you can refer to https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261820.aspx. The same file with 2007 still works in 2010.

10. Finishing setup. If everything is working, you should see the configuration succeeded message box.

11. Go back to the browser window in step 4 and click Provision. This will start Lotus Notes Connector service.

Setup and crawl Lotus Notes Content Source in SharePoint Server 2010

1. In Service Applications, click Search Service Application.

2. Create a Lotus Notes Content Source. The difference with 2007 is you don’t need to manually select every server name and each database name with a dropdown list any more. just copy and paste the Lotus Notes database addresses and it’s done.

For example, I created a document library in the root directory of Domino Server. The name is Document.nsf. There’s a doc inside, talking about Halo 3 ODST. So in the address line I put down notes://domino85/document.nsf.

The document in the lib – Mass Effect 2 is the one I’m playing the second round right now but this is just a demo<- horrible smiley btw.

4. Kick off a full crawl to see the result!

Refine Lotus Notes search result with Metadata Property Mappings

When you do a search after the crawl, you may see a strange ID in the title of the result. This is the same behavior with 2007 – the crawler doesn’t know which field should be used as the title, so it chooses the uid of the notes document. This can be changed through Metadata Property Mappings, which used to be called managed property.

1. In Search Service Application, click Metadata Property Mappings from the left bar. Then click Categories.

2. Click Notes in the categories. This UI is much better than 2007!

3. Since this is a document library, the title should be “Subject” Notes field. So click the drop down of “Subject(Text)”.

4. You can add mappings to the managed property: Title.

5. Don’t forget to click on the Title link after you mapped it with Subject(Text).

6. Move up Subject(Text) in the order to make sure it is the first to be picked up and mapped to the Title. If you skip this step, the doc id will be picked up instead.

7. A full crawl to make sure everything is updated.

8. Done!

Jie.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 05, 2010
  Hi there.   I have a question about crawling Lotus Notes databases, if you would be so kind, since it seems you have a lot of experience with it. I have run through all the steps to get Lotus Notes content sources working within SharePoint 2007 (similar to the steps above, but for 2007).  However I am unable to add a Lotus Notes content source using the SSP Search Administration.  I can see the Lotus Notes option as a content source, but my Domino server does not auto-populate and even if I manually type the Domino server name, the databases don't populate. However when I used your MSA (codeplex SP Search Admin) tool and try to get the list of Notes DB's I can successfully add the Lotus Notes content sources!  The list of Domino databases shows up and I can add them to my SSP. When I try crawling the Notes content sources that have been added with your tool, I get the following error:  The object was not found. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.) Any idea what might be the problem? I ran notessetup.exe again and confirmed the password is typed correctly.  I confirmed the correct Notes ID is showing up in the notes.ini file.  I confirmed the lcppn30.dll was dropped to the Sharepoint/bin and Notes folders.  I can open the databases using the Notes Client without any issues. Your help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

• Anonymous
  May 09, 2010
  If the server name is not auto populated, and the crawler cannot crawl the content source, then it would still be a permission problem. You may want to check again on the notes id - reinstall notes client (remove its configuration complete) may help.

• Anonymous
  June 09, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2011
  Hi Jie li Can you remember if you installed the Notes klient on Windows server 2008 or 2008 R2 ? I was told be IBM that 8.5.2 doesn't support 2008R2, which I have a hard time to believe as they support Win7. hope for at quick "positive" respond your help is greatly appreciated. Michael

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2011
  Hi Jie li, Do you have a screenshot of mapping database? How can I store Lotus Notes user IDs in this database? Thanks.

• Anonymous
  March 22, 2011
  Be careful when we store Lotus Notes ID, in the mapping database, to use the canonical name (ex: "CN=Tom GUST/OU=JOB/O=WORK"). Personally, I use a Names field type with Address dialog.

• Anonymous
  March 27, 2011
  Hi Lie, i could proceed untill step 7 (run NotesSetup.exe). Unfortunatly, in our 14 hive, there isn't a NotesSetup.exe. I googled a lot but couldn't find a hint where to get this Notes Index Setup Wizard from... Do you have a hint for me? thx, Marco

• Anonymous
  March 28, 2011
  Jie, i could resolve my last post by myself: On my SP2010 Server there are two 14 hives: "C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions14" "C:Program FilesMicrosoft Office Servers14.0" and i searched in the wrong one... I'm really sorry! Marco

• Anonymous
  April 19, 2011
  I got to 11. "Go back to the browser window in step 4 and click Provision. This will start Lotus Notes Connector service."  I've checked, double-checked and triple checked everything but still get the same error: The Lotus Notes Connector could not be started. Please make sure you have completed the following steps before provisioning the connector. Install and setup Lotus Notes client Download the Lotus Notes C++ API Toolkit, extract it and copy the lcppn30.dll file to the 14.0Bin folder and the Lotus Notes folder on the index server Run Notessetup.exe on the index server using the same credentials that you will use to provision the Lotus Notes Connector Any ideas?

• Anonymous
  February 03, 2012
  SharePoint integration problem with Lotus Notes The brief information of the problem is that SharePoint server 2010 crawler could not crawl Lotus Notes database. The detailed information is that, customer is using Lotus Notes Domino 7.0.4 FP1, they have many databases inside that Lotus Notes Domino but only one database need to be crawled for now. After configuration according to two links “Configure and use the Lotus Notes connector (SharePoint Server 2010)” and “Crawl Lotus Domino with Lotus Notes Connector in SharePoint Server 2010”, the administrator of SharePoint server found an error in crawl log related to full crawl, the error information in URL column is “notes://seapp01/acrde/report01.nsf  Error while crawling LOB contents. ( The operation has timed out )”, however, he had adjusted the timeout value of search crawler to a very large value. A very strange phenomenon is that the error information changed sometimes to “Error while crawling LOB contents. ( A requested item is not found. )”. The administrator had captured network traffic packets according to my request in order to monitor the traffic of full crawler, but could not find any traffic between SharePoint server and Lotus Notes Domino server. After analysis the SharePoint server log, I found that there is an exception in the “Lotus Notes Protocol Handler”, which is related to “GetDatabaseName”.

• Anonymous
  February 03, 2012
  SharePoint integration problem with Lotus Notes The brief information of the problem is that SharePoint server 2010 crawler could not crawl Lotus Notes database. The detailed information is that, customer is using Lotus Notes Domino 7.0.4 FP1, they have many databases inside that Lotus Notes Domino but only one database need to be crawled for now. After configuration according to two links “Configure and use the Lotus Notes connector (SharePoint Server 2010)” and “Crawl Lotus Domino with Lotus Notes Connector in SharePoint Server 2010”, the administrator of SharePoint server found an error in crawl log related to full crawl, the error information in URL column is “notes://seapp01/acrde/report01.nsf  Error while crawling LOB contents. ( The operation has timed out )”, however, he had adjusted the timeout value of search crawler to a very large value. A very strange phenomenon is that the error information changed sometimes to “Error while crawling LOB contents. ( A requested item is not found. )”. The administrator had captured network traffic packets according to my request in order to monitor the traffic of full crawler, but could not find any traffic between SharePoint server and Lotus Notes Domino server. After analysis the SharePoint server log, I found that there is an exception in the “Lotus Notes Protocol Handler”, which is related to “GetDatabaseName”.

• Anonymous
  February 25, 2013
  Very useful.  Many thanks for posting this.