When your working with IBM Lotus Domino
you come across lots of little settings that have been added to the product
over the years to make life easier for the administrator or developer however
a lot of these settings are not covered in the standard Lotus training
courses. This series of blog postings aims to cover some of these ‘forgotten
features’ the first of which is Replication priorities.

No matter how big or small your Domino
environment, setting up your replication schedules can always be a bit
of a problem.  The users wants data replicated between servers faster
and the network guys want you to cut down on the amount of data that gets
pushed over the network during business hours. One solution is to setup
individual replication connection documents and set them to only replicate
certain databases however as you start rolling out new databases you’ll
find yourself editing replication connection documents to add the databases
in and possibly even forget about a server and wonder why the users complain
at a later date.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to setup
your replication documents and then just forget about them, well with replication
priorities this is exactly what you can do. First off you need to need
to decide on your schedule. I always try to go something like every 15
minutes for important databases, every hour for standard databases and
every 6 hours for unimportant databases. Once you know what your schedule
is going to be you then need to create 3 replication documents from your
spoke server to the hub.

For each replication document you need
to select one of the three replication priorities, either High, High &
Medium or High & Medium & Low. I also like to add a *.ntf to the
‘Do Not Replicate’ area of the High & medium replication document for
reasons you’ll see in a moment. When setting the schedule for each of the
documents don’t forget that for the H&M&L document it replicates
the high priority databases so it’s best to try avoid it clashing with
the H and H&M schedules.

Now that the replication documents are
setup how do you make full use of them. Well by default all databases will
be preset as medium in their replication settings so all you have to do
is decide what databases need to replicate more and what ones need to replicate
less. I would recommend putting the Domino Directory and AdminP database
into the high priority and any logging databases such as events4 into the
low priority. if you added the *.ntf into the H&M replication document
then they will be ignored as medium and will only replicate with the low
databases saving you a lot of effort in changing all templates to Low.

So once you have your replication priorities
setup and working as you roll out a new application you just need to set
the databases priority setting and it will automatically fall into the
right schedule, your users will be happy, your network person will be happy
and most importantly you have less to look after in the future.