Lotus broadens Domino with advanced search features

Lotus Development Corp. has extended Domino's knowledge management tools with new search capabilities for the groupware.

Domino Extended Search 2.0, which Lotus unveiled at last week's KM World show here, lets users search for information in Domino databases as well as in outside sources.

The upgrade features a new Web interface that relies on Java servlets and HTML templates to let developers add search capabilities to existing Web applications. This approach improves the search system's performance and scalability as well, officials said.

"A lot of customers are starting with a search for knowledge management because first they want to find stuff they already have access to," said Scott Cooper, Lotus' general manager of knowledge management products, in Cambridge, Mass. "The next major step is to let people collaborate on that information."

Domino Extended Search uses a query language technology that evolved out of the Minerva project at Lotus' parent, IBM. The Minerva technology translates queries into the search formats used by other sources and sites.

Domino Extended Search includes a Link Toolkit to enable developers to profile data sources to be accessible by the system.

Version 2.0 also adds support for new information sources, including Domino.doc; Lotus Enterprise Integrator applications; and 10 additional Web content search sites, including Yahoo Inc.'s Yahoo.com and Cable News Network Inc.'s CNN.com.

Lotus will continue to add support for information sources that can be mined by the search application, officials said. Sources said Lotus is developing technology that will be able to search more complex information repositories, such as Internet newsgroups.

Domino Extended Search 2.0 is available now, priced at $30 per user and $3,995 for one to four CPUs per server. A version for five or more processors per server costs $9,995.