Displaying the Correct Titles of Lotus Notes Documents in SharePoint Search Results

Liam has posted a great article on configuring SharePoint to search Lotus Notes.

The post reminded me that I missed out a part of the configuration steps - how to get the titles to show up correctly. By default, the search results display the GUID of the Notes document which isn't pretty. For example, you may get results which resemble the following:



Having Guids as titles really does not make any sense to anyone reading it.

What I like best about this part of the configuration is that it demonstrates how flexible SharePoint can be. Here, we have a Lotus Notes document which is at best an alien to SharePoint. It was created by a completely different organisation (IBM) and may be tweaked and customized by Notes developers anyway they deem fit. Yet, we can easily configure SharePoint to understand what fields the Notes document has. Pretty neat, huh?

The answer lies in the Metadata property mappings. You can access the Metadata Property Mappings page from SharedServices Administration Page > Search Settings > Metadata property mappings.

1. Where is the Title Stored?
First,we need to take a look at the fields available in our Lotus Notes document. Lotus Notes documents stores its Title/Subject in a variety of places. To locate the name of the field, we'll have to take a look at the document's fields. To do so, simply open the document using the Lotus Notes client. Right-click anywhere on the document and select Document Properties...

A dialog appears showing the document's properties. Look for the field that contain's its title. For example, in the diagram below, the field is named Subject

2. Link the SharePoint's Title field to the Lotus Notes Document's Title field

Next, we will use the Metadata property mappings administration page to link the document's Title field to SharePoint's Title field.

In the Metadata property mappings administration page, click on the managed property named Title (you may have to navigate to the second page to find it) and select Edit/Map Property.



In the Mappings to crawled properties section, click Add Mapping. The Crawled property selection dialog appears in a new window.

In the Select Category field, choose Notes. Select the property you would like to map to. In our case, we will choose the Subject field. Click OK.

Back at the Edit Managed Property page, click the Move Up button twice to give the notesfield higher priority over the Basic:displaytitle(Text) field. Click OK to save the changes.

3. Start a Full Crawl

Finally, start a full crawl so that SharePoint and index the new Notes property. After the crawl completes, you will find that the correct title now appears in the Search results!