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.

Live Blog – Corrections coming later ( when I find some time )

This session is all about the future ideals and strategy for the Lotus product line which includes the workplace family also. Great empahise is being given on the fact that there is always going to be backwards compatibility. No mater how many new versions come out in the future you will always be able to run that lotus Notes V1 database on the latest client and server and that also applies for the workplace products, the notes client plugin for the Workplace Collaborative package will also run those V1 applications.

Just announced : Lotus Notes 7 Beta 3 will be released this afternoon. The development team is very happy with the progress of the beta and feel that that stability will not be a problem for the first official release, I personally think that many people will be upgrading direct to this new version when it’s available. In a recent survey from people who ring the Lotus support lines the 4th quarter results for 2004 show that 94% of callers have completed their V6.x upgrades.

The challenges to IBM lotus in the last year are being dealt with, They have more support staff and they now have the lowest backlog of support issues in 2 years. Fault tollerence testing has been increased and root cause analysis is progressed.

Lotus Notes 7.0 has some dramatic scalabbility gains with 80% increase in NotesBench results and up to 300% on the linux platform. There is also 25% less cpu usage. The Domino Domain Admin tool will assist in the admins job and the web services and (optional) Db2 backend will help developers. There are also a lot of Open Standards like SIP/Simple and WSDl being added to the platform to allow better intergration between the family of products and also with other platforms.

As of today 25000 mailboxes in IBm are using Domino 7.0, with a target of 50000 mailboxes by May 2005. This internal usage of the notes client will be the greatest internal testing the notes client for any release of Domino.

For the demo of the Workplace Rich Client in this session it has been pointed out that in this case the user if a Domino mail user and not a Workplace mail user. This was done specifically to show that you do not have to roll out Workplace messaging to make use of the new Workplace client. The demo shows how it’s possible to detach documents from a domino database directly into the workplace document store and vice versa. This is nice as you don’t have to dump it to the local drive and then load up a seperate application. In Notes 7 there is SameTime integration but what if you only have the Workplace Awareness module, well opening the notes database in the workplace client enabled that very same iintegration.