Back in October of 2018 we released a new companion utility for Teamstudio Adviser with the snappy title of the Teamstudio Adviser Data Extraction Utility. I wrote about it in a blog post on October 18, 2018 which also describes how the utility works.

Since that date, many of our existing Adviser customers have been using the utility to extract the exact data they need to create their reports. As with any of our tools and utilities, once people start using them they find different "use cases" and request feature enhancements.

To that end we're pleased to announce the release of V1.5 of the Data Extraction Utility today. This new version has four significant enhancements (and one minor fix).

The four enhancements are as follows:

1. Exclusion of "System" Databases

When Adviser performs its scans, it reports on all Notes databases, regardless of whether they are in use or not. This also includes all of the "system" databases (the databases and templates that are included when the Domino server is installed). This can clutter the data with unneeded information about databases that have nothing to do with the information the client is attempting to report on.

Now when you are creating your data extraction schedule, by default "system" databases and templates will not be extracted. If you do want to report on these "system" databases, there is a new option to include them in the data extraction (as shown below):

2. File System Location Creation

When creating the data extraction schedule, you can now indicate where on the file system to place the CSV file that is created. If you list a file system location that does not exist, the data extraction process will now first verify if the indicated location exists and, if it does not, it will create the location for you.

3. Copy from Existing Schedule

A number of our users have been creating data extraction schedules that are very similar in content to one another. If they had chosen a large number of values to report on and have rearranged the order of the columns for the extract this can be very cumbersome and time consuming to create each data extraction schedule.

Now a user can make an almost exact copy of an existing data extraction schedule by simply selecting an existing schedule from the view and then clicking the "New Schedule" action button in the view. The user will be asked if they want to make a copy of the selected document or create a new, blank document (as shown below):

4. Extraction of "Search Terms" Information

Within Teamstudio Adviser you can create a list of what we call "search terms". These are values that you want the Adviser scanning engine to locate within the design of your Notes databases. This is a very powerful part of the complexity scans since you, as the Adviser user, can include additional values that you want to report on. Many of our clients use this functionality to discover which of their Notes databases have integrations into external applications (such as Microsoft Office) and or contain any functionality for connecting to an external RDBMS via ODBC connections (both of these can be very difficult to recreate in other systems).

We have now included the ability to also extract the information about how many times each search term is used within each of your Notes databases.

When you select the instance of Adviser that you want to extract the data from, the utility will scan and list all of the search terms that are configured in Adviser as a selectable value to be exported within the list of DB Complexity Information (as shown below):

When the CSV file is opened there will be additional columns with the header being the search term and the cells on each row indicating the number of times the search term was discovered in the Notes database.

How to Get It

We hope these enhancements make it easier for you to extract the data from Adviser that you need to make your reports more meaningful. We do already have a list of additional enhancements we want to add to the Adviser Data Extraction Utility which we plan to work on soon. If there are any other enhancements that you believe would benefit not only yourself, but all other users, please feel free to let us know!

To download the latest version of the Adviser Data Extraction Utility, click the button below. Enjoy!

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