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.

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:

- Preview of mails, attachments or files in the familiar Outlook format
- Highlighting of the located search words (multicolour)
- Intelligent analysis of your inbox with “Lookeen Analytics“
- Quicker loading of Outlook
- Network Detection: Intelligent indexing of the network resources
- Automatic detection of newly added Outlook archives
- Configurable search favourites with quick access
- Search history management
- New feature “display more results”
- Select all action (STRG-A) possible
- Indexing of different data in recurring appointments
- Automatic indexing of attached mails
- Many new Outlook data arrays now searchable (e.g. location in appointments)
- Now available: one Lookeen configuration file for all Outlook profiles
- 20 new GPO commands for enterprise usage
- Improved drag&drop features
- Image preview (for .jpg, .png, .bmp, .tif, etc.)
- And many other new features…

*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.

The purchase price of the full version is still 34.90 €.

www.foerderland.de is a German website with news, articles and tips around startup companies and the foundation of an enterprise.

As the Axonic GmbH is an exemplary company in this field, Foerderland.de aksed our COO Peter Oehler for an interview.

You will find the German interview here. For anglophone visitors, we have a google translated version of this article here.

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.

Martin Welker informed in his latest blog about Lookeen within a company’s environment. Thereby he focused on the installation of Lookeen on the companies’ computers.
Depending on the size of the company and its infrastructure, the use of terminal servers is appropriate. By doing so, the applications will be installed centrally on the terminal server and they will be made available to the users through the terminal server, instead of being installed separately on each computer. End devices with various operating systems can be used for the access.

The applications are executed on the servers, while only the application interface is displayed on the users’ end devices.
The end device does not need to provide processing power for the execution of the application. Thereby also devices with weak hardware, e.g. older devices or also PDAs, can be used for the access to new applications which require a lot of resources.

Only few data is transferred between end device and server. The user’s entries are transferred from the end device to the server and are processed there. The result will be transferred to the user’s screen and displayed.

For the fact that this function of Windows servers offers few configuration possibilities and its handling is often complicated, the US company Citrix specialised itself on such terminal server applications. By using the so-called „MetaFrame Presentation Server“, Citrix-Systems help system administrators with the configuration of distributed systems within a company’s environment.

“These days, companies have higher expectations on networks than ever before. The management is looking for ways to increase productivity and cost-efficiency…”
- (Statement of a Lookeen bulk customer and Citrix Gold Partner)

Nowadays, most applications can normally be installed and used on terminal servers. However, it starts to become difficult when it comes to the configuration of the programmes – especially regarding the existing authorisation system.
Among other things, the following information is important:

• Where will the index be saved?
• Where will which settings be saved?
• Which access authorisations are necessary for which files?

Therefore Lookeen stays transparent concerning all these aspects. We do not want to be cagey about where you can find the index and in which format the settings have to be configured. We, the Lookeen-team, already provide a 100% terminal server and Citrix compatibility. For that, Lookeen simply has to be installed by the system administrators who are responsible for the terminal server. After that you use the Lookeen group policies in order to configure restrictions for each user or for each group of users. The settings of the individual Lookeen installations can be personalized simply and easily with the help of a XML-file.

After that, the users simply log on their work stations and will immediately be able to use Lookeen. Because the Lookeen licence model is based on the number of users, it does not matter on how many work stations each user logs on. Further licences are not required.

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.

We, the Lookeen-team, would like to thank all for the overwhelming participation in our Microsoft Sharepoint-survey. Altogether, several hundreds of companies took part in our survey. We were especially very impressed by the fact that a very big number of the respondents took the time to express their wishes and ideas freely. We were able to take up a lot of ideas, improvement suggestions and inspiration from the analyses. The survey confirmed our assumption about the indexing of Sharepoint-servers being an interesting topic for companies. This was reflected in the fact that a lot of companies agreed to take part in the beta phase.

Other interesting key data of the analysis:

• About 15% of the companies which do not use Microsoft Sharepoint so far are planning the introduction of Microsoft Sharepoint
• 60% of all users wish for a functionality with which email contents can be easily uploaded to the Microsoft Sharepoint server.
• More than 60% of the participants would prefer to simply add the Microsoft Sharepoint server as an additional index source.

Naturally we will inform you soon about the introduction date of the Lookeen Microsoft Sharepoint edition. Do you have questions about Microsoft Sharepoint or would you also like to apply for the beta test phase? Then simply send us an email to info@lookeen.net – keyword: „Sharepoint“.

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!

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.

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 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.