Technical Considerations for Worldox

I don’t usually do posts on technical issues that are of interest mainly to IT people. However, firms interested in Worldox seem to be saying increasingly “my IT guy has some questions.”  The following is intended to answer basic technical questions about Worldox.

Many firms are accustomed to defining hardware requirements on the assumption of SQL-based software. Worldox is a totally different animal and does not use SQL. The bottom line is that Worldox is not very hardware intensive and will probably run on an existing file server assuming it is reasonably up to date. See the Worldox site for a more detailed description of technical requirements. If you are running MS Server 2008R2, you must disable SMB2 (known to corrupt databases) and re-enable 8.3 support prior to installing Worldox.

Worldox can be integrated with Active Directory to meet security requirements. Security settings in Worldox are ported to Active Directory and vice-versa.

Worldox uses what is known as a “distributed database.” It creates stub files containing profile information in every directory it touches. The indexer (based on the ISYS indexing program) parses those files and creates an index. It also full-text indexes all possible documents (passworded documents and non-OCR’d PDF’s are not indexed for obvious reasons). Emails and email attachments are also indexed. Searches are based on the ISYS indexes.  The indexes by default are rebuilt from scratch once a week so that they are always “clean.”

In operation, the indexer checks for change records every 10 seconds. So in terms of activity, ask yourself: how many files can be opened, saved, created, etc. by X users in 10 seconds? The Worldox client intercepts all file I/O commands for supported programs and pops up the Worldox interface (instead of using Windows Explorer). Again, not very CPU-intensive.

Worldox recommends that the indexer run on a stand-alone PC. The indexer does NOT run as a service. The indexer includes a number of options (such as limited records management options; deleting files from the Salvage Bin after a given period; deleting empty directories, etc.).  For a more detailed description of requirements and optimal settings see the “Indexer” section of the “Installing and Configuring Worldox” document on my web site.

In short, of all the software programs I have ever supported over the years, Worldox is by far the most rock-solid.

Comments

[Staci Burruel]

Data organizing software such as that one can make searches a lot easier. Once the database is organized, business transactions would become smoother.

[excel development]

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