ID107 : What’s new in Lotus Domino 7.0 Administration

Live Blog – Corrections later

6.x introduced a lot of new admin features. Policies, smart upgrades, activedirectory sync, dns blacklists etc. These features have been improved and added to in Domino 7.0

So what’s new.

SMART UPGRADE

After listening to feedback on the V6x smart upgrade features the Domino Admin team has vastly improved how the 7.0 version works. They have also added a lot of the new features in the 6.5.4 release. The first new feature is smart tracking, where you can see who has upgraded and even those who have refused an upgrade. The smart upgrade system can also limit the number of smart upgraded happening to ease network usage. Smartupgrade also supports clustering to improve failover. Smartupgrade has also been added to the policy documents to help on the rollout of settings

Policy Based Management

Introduced in R6.x the policy system allows you to roll out settings to users automatically. The benefits are clear with standard settings for users that will help reduce helpdesk calls and lower the cost of ownership. In 7.0 there is a new Policy Lockdown feature that can stop users from changing their settings and there is a new Mail Policy. For locked down settings the client UI is disabled so the users can’t even attempt to change the options.. the Mail and Calendar settings policy is brand new. It basically allows the admin to enforce settings in the users mail file preferences. It’s done by the server so there is no client interaction to apply the policies.

Web Admin Client

One of the challenges for the Domino admin team was to create the webadmin client that will work iin Linux. There is approximatly 85% – 90% comparity to the windows admin client. The UI looks very like the Win32 UI and it works in IE, Mozilla and other browsers.

Admin Scriptability

Three new notification methods and an event handler have been added to Domino 7.0. You can send console commands like tell the router to quit and restart automatically if the server generates an event that the mail is starting to back up. You can send Server Controller commands to restart the entire server and even run agents. The run program command has also been upgraded to allow passing of event info.

Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM)

This is a big new feature in Domino 7. Basically it is a central monitoring tool for the entire domain. It gathers the information into a central database and can analyse the data for you, by doing this it can do root cause analysis and even suggest corrective actions that will help you quickly resolve the problem. This new tool can determine the health of your entire domain and reduce the overall cost of ownership of the system. Kind of like MOM for Windows except it works and doesn’t have a sucky name

DDM also has the concept of collection servers where events can be collected to regional servers and then rolled up into a central database. This is know as a collection hierarchy and is created in the events4.nsf database. The events database is also used to create the probes and filters that you will need for DDM. Out of the box there are a number of default probes so you can get up and running very quickly. Probes can have special ‘target’ servers so if you have a probe set to run on smtp enabled servers then when you start the probe it will go out and find those servers for you. you don’t need to specify the server names. A great time server, especially if you add a new server at a later date.

DDM also supports multiple domains and assignments of probes so if an smtp probe is triggered it can assign the work to your smtp administrator. The ddm system will create tickets for those people and can auto close events when the ddm system sees that something has been fixed, either by automated corrective action or admin interaction. Data can also be collerated so if a problem is detected on a server then ddm can tell you what other servers are having the same problem. DDM can suggest corrective actions and even perfom them for you automatically. Hey, I wonder what happened to that intelliwatch product that Candle used to sell… hang on, weren’t they bought out by IBM… ahhh…

email Management

Domino 7 adds a number of enhancements to the blacklist feature that was added in domino 6.x. Domino 7 now has dns Whitelists, private blacklists and private whitelists ( where anything listed here is always allowed through no matter what ). Message disclaimers have also been added. Mail rules have been enhanced and archive by create date is now possible.

These new admin features can really make things easier for the Domino 7 administrator and makes this new version a required upgrade. And with the WebAdmin client running on linux you can finally get rid of those windows server and clients.