How Do You Store and Distribute the HTML Archives of Your Domino Databases?

If you’re using Teamstudio Export to create HTML archives of your Domino databases, you’ve probably put some thought into how you are going to distribute the finished archive sites to users. After all, probably the main reason most people are using Export is to provide their users with easily navigable, searchable access to the Notes documents and other data in their old Domino databases. Even although technically, all you need to view an Export archive is a web browser, most people want to use some other means to distribute access to the archives other than just putting the files on a file server.

You have several options, when it comes to distributing the HTML archives. Each archive is represented by a folder containing the files making up the site containing the HTML representation of a single Domino database. The folder name has a suffix of “.tse”. Within the .tse folder is a file named index.html which is, of course, the starting point for your browser, and all you need to do is point your browser at the file and it will do the rest. So of course probably the simplest way to distribute these files to your users is to place them on a file server.

The HTML archives that Export produces are just that, i.e. static archives. Although they do a pretty good (some might say great) job of rendering Notes forms as they would appear in the Notes client, it’s a read-only representation that allows you to view static data. As such, the archives do not maintain any of the access control limitations that applied in the original application. In fact, the data that is contained in the archived is constrained by the access control that applies to the Notes ID that was used to create the archive in the first place.

For that reason, if you choose to use a file server to distribute access to an archive, you will want to think about who has what access to the files in the archive. You need to make sure that only the authorized users can read the files, and that only admins have write access. This is all explained in more detail in this post we wrote about distributing archives a couple of years ago.

Of course, since the archives are formatted as web sites, another way to distribute them is by placing them on a web server. The post linked above explains how to do that if you are using a Domino server as your web server, but of course there is no dependency on Domino and you could choose any web server you like to distribute your archives.

Another alternative, also described in the post above, is to distribute your Domino archives as Microsoft Sharepoint sites. This approach is a little bit more involved because you have to use Sharepoint Designer to import the data into your Sharepoint site. However, it seems that many of our customers are using Sharepoint, and it is still a straightforward process to import the data and distribute it this way.

If you have been a user of Teamstudio Export for a while, you will probably be aware that we are constantly improving the product and adding new features. Mostly, those features involve improving the fidelity or functionality of the finished archives. For example, last week we released a point release of Export: version 3.1.1, which included 38 minor fixes or improvements. As time goes on though, we are finding it increasingly difficult to support some new features without the benefit of a web server in the distribution mix. And this is where we could use your help.

We speak to customers every day, so of course we can gather some anecdotal evidence. But it would really help us to know how many customers are using some sort of web server (Domino, Sharepoint, vanilla web server) to distribute archives, as opposed to placing the files on a file server. And so we created a little questionnaire. We can call it little, because it literally has one question on it. If you want to give us more info, there's space for that, but you don’t have to. So it should take less than a minute to complete.

If you have questions about any of this, please feel free to contact us. If you’d like to help us by answering our question, click below. And thank you!