Customizing Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino

A really cool feature of Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino (heretofor referred to as AA06) is the ability to customize the XML file that the tool uses for determining the databases & directories that are excluded from the scan, the quadrants that information falls into and the recommendations. For example, the default configuration excludes the directory named MAIL because mail migration is performed via Exchange Migration Wizard 2005 for Lotus Notes, but perhaps in your environment, user’s mail databases are in a directory with a different name. You can modify the XML file to exclude that directory so that the reports don’t include information about user’s mail databases.

It’s very common in Notes environments to have lots of databases created from a single custom template (or a modified version of one of the default templates). You can modify the XML file to automatically make a specific recommendation for any of the databases created from a specific template, or you might decide that although you have modified a standard template, you really feel that the modified applications should fall into Quadrant 1 or 2 because they can be easily migrated to existing SharePoint templates and Quadrant 3 and 4 applications require additional analysis, unlike these applications.

This information is stored in an XML file named AARules.xml which is placed in the directory where Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino was installed. By default, this directory is c:\Program Files\Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino. Before you modify this file, make a backup copy so that it is easy to roll back to the original configuration or to use the original as a reference.

More information about this file and AA06 is available in the whitepaper named Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino, which you can download from the here.

- Amy