Recently I posted an article about creating a new Custom Management Interface using the Microsoft Management Console up at faxlearning.wordpress.com. This article specifically focuses on Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition, but the concepts apply to any Windows application. Check out the article and let me know what you think, either here or on the faxlearning blog site.

You can also watch a video version of the tutorial at youtube.com/opentextfddg.

Wow, it looks like I have come back to where I started. My first real job (second if you count the camera shop on Key Biscayne I worked in during High School, third if you count my Islander News paper route) was in Tech Support for PC Docs in Tallahassee, Florida. Soon after I left the company to move to New York City, they got bought out by Hummingbird. Then Hummingbird got bought  by Open Text. Since then I have spent time working for small companies and big ones (Microsoft) and now Captaris. Then today Open Text announced that they are acquiring Captaris. So I am back where I began...bizarre!

I just finished my class in Dubai and a student asked about SMTP integration. My throat was shot and I was barely able to think straight, so I didn't have an answer for him. But after I had a chance to recover, I tried it out and came up with this little screencast on the problem. Its very easy as you can see here. By the way, this video is now hosted on YouTube, Google Video, and Revver. Revver is by far the best of these because I can actually see what I am doing.

When you purchase Alchemy, you can purchase several different license types. Administrator gives all knowing access to everything. Index can still add content. Search just searches. Administrator costs the most, and Search the least. So a company will typically get many Search licenses, a few  Index licenses, and minimal Administrators. But when building applications, some people aren't aware that you can change the license type of your application. You should always pick the license type based on the type of activities your application will perform.

So to run an application with the features of Administrator, just load your app as you normally would. If you want to use an Index Station license you need to have the following line before you load any databases:

auApp.PutOptionsString("License", "Client", "IdxStation");

So typically this would show up right before:

auApp.LoadOptionsFile("");

But the important part of that command is when it loads the databases in the options file. You could replace it with this line to achieve the same result:

auApp.Databases.Add(@"c:\blah.ald");

where blah.ald is the name of a database.

But I mentioned that there was a Search license you could consume instead. Achieving this it turns out is not easy...well, its easy to achieve, but learning how isn't. I asked around internally and many people had no idea. It wasn't until I got to the class this week and someone suggested this that I learned how to get this to work. What you need to do is to release the PutOptionsString line with this:

auApp.CanWrite = false;

On one hand this kind of makes sense. But it is so completely different from the PutOptionsString line that its not that intuitive. By calling that line before either adding a database or loading the options file, you consume only a Search license and not the more expensive Administrator license.