Presented By Bill Buchan and Paul Mooney

The show begins even before it’s time
to kick off with Bill shouting from the stage telling people to turn off
phone and telling people to find empty seats beside the cute looking people.
The room is full to the brim and I won’t be surprised if there is an overflow
room or five.

Oh man, I can’t blog this, laughing
way toooooo much.

Blogs, Wikis and feeds are internet technologies
that are starting to enter the enterprise world. Blogs are a way to simple
publish content, wiki’s are a way to easily collaborate on pages and feeds
are a way to access the content. A lot of these technologies are entering
the enterprise below the radar so they need to be made fit for business
while still easy to use. Policies and security should be examined. You
can also look at communities within your company to allow groups like ‘Sales’
to all edit the same areas.

Blogs are starting to make a very significant
inroads into the business. The first thing about a blog is that it must
be easy to publish content. An example blog on screen is Ed Brill’s blog.
Another example on screen is the Ford Motor Company, this blog however
does not have comments but it is still a valid blog.

Workplace Blogs : Tech preview available
on Alphaworks. Currently 2.5 but soon to see an update to 2.6

Wikis are not being used within IBM
as much as blogs but it does have a quick adaption curve. A wiki is a website
where anybody who can read the wiki can also edit the wiki. An importany
wiki on the web is Wikipedia but internally most wiki’s will not be as
large as Wikipedia.  Wiki’s also contain revisioning tools to allow
you to stepback changes that may be incorrect.

Wiki for WorkPlace is currently in development
but has no current release date.

While Blogs and Wikis are used for creating
content Feeds are used to read the content or to be notified when new content
was created. feeds are also extending beyond their original context with
things like PodCasts, RSS calendars etc.  The feeds are in XML in
a variety of flavours, RSS, Atom, OPML and RDF. IBM are going to be focusing
on RSS and Atom for their products. Atom does have a IETF ( RFC Standard
) while RSS doesn’t. Atom are also working on a publishing spec.

IBM have a goal to make sure that you
see Orange buttons everywhere for all products and pages. They are also
working, where possible, to integrate feeds into their products where suitable
for both publishing and reading. Workplace feeds will be integrated into
TeamSpaces, Document Libraries, Web Content Manager, WorkPlace Forms etc.
Basically anywhere where new information can be added will eventually have
an associated feed. There will also be portlets that can consume feeds.

There is also work going on in Domino.Doc,
QuickPlace, Domino and Activity Explorer to add feeds to them.

One interesting thingin the demo is
the ability to ‘Push Content’ to an external blog.  This would apply
if an internal blogger also had an external blog then they can create content
once and have it published in two places. Saving time and making life easier
for those CEO’s who are starting to blog.  They mention they are using
RSS to do this. I’m not sure why they don’t  use the blogger api,
might be easier and would support more external services.

the Workplace Document Manager can also
read in RSS feeds like Podcasts, the system will pull in the enclosure
and add it to the library automatically for you.

My Summary : This session was very similar
in the first half to the session myself and Richard gave last year however
there was not as much technical information. More like a 10,000 ft overview.
When talking about RSS feeds they never went into any detail on how the
XML feeds are made up. Demo’s were pretty good but they never showed the
new Lotus Notes blogging template. The demo of the enhanced RSS feeds in
Workplace was pretty interesting.

Brief Review of DDM

DDM was introduced in Domino 7. You
configure it in the events4.nsf database where you setup probes, filters
and server collections.

The data that is generated by DDM goes
into DDM.NSF. This is a new database with workflow to help you assign issues
to people. Once the issue is resolved then you can close the event leaving
comments if you want. The system will also track multiple occurences of
issues and suggest possible causes and solutions. Some of these solutions
can be automatically applied to the issue or if that is not possible then
it can bring you to the correct place.  These are configurable so
you can add your own or adjust the supplied ones.

Introducing DDM into your domain

One important note. Server Collections
are implemented as outlines so anybody editing them must have at least
design access to events4.nsf.  The first server that you upgrade to
Domino7 should be your admin server. When you do your first upgrade then
events4.nsf will add in the new probes and filters from the template. Design
Refresh will not do this for you. DDM will also try to remove invalid documents
from events4.nsf.

DDM is self initialising. When the event
task loads up it will create the ddm.nsf. You should now check the ACL.
Some information may start appearing in the ddm.nsf due to existing legacy
events probes. By default the DDM filter will exclude simple events and
all probe configurations documents are turned off.

When your upgrading other servers you
should add the servers to the server collections in events4.nsf on the
hub and then replice it out, upgrade the server and the system will replicate
over the ddm.nsf rather then create a new copy. For new servers you should
point the install to an existing server with DDM for it to pull over a
replica.

If upgrading from 7.x to a higher maint
release then default probe config docs may get disabled when events4.nsf
gets upgraded.

Reports from DDM

Two ways to enable probes, The first
is slow and steady. enable a few probes, review the output and tweak them
and then repeat for the next batch. The second method is the Buckshot approach
where you just enable everything at once.

DDM will detect things like agents in
databases that are not running due to bad signatures or agents taking too
long to run etc. IBM found quite a lot of out of office agents that were
not completing within the specified time in their domain. It can also detect
if an agent was disable due to the design task running on the server.

Messaging probes can detect things like
improperlyu addressed emails.  This could be an agent that may be
triggering mail sends.The messaging probes can also detect if multiple
names exist in the NAB for a single user, normally caused by cascaded addressbooks.

Security probes can detect is users
have tried to access servers or databases where they don’t have the correct
access.

The replication probes can detect replication
issues like not being able to replicate due to enforced acl’s

Managing the amount of event reports

Once the probes are turned on you will
start getting a lot of data in ddm.nsf. The first thing to do is start
looking at all the reports and try figure out what might be causing the
issue. One trick is to check to see if there are any other issues in relation
to the same database, this may provide a different solution.

By using filters you can stop documents
from being reported in ddm.nsf.  when a filter is turned on then new
events will not be generated and existing event reports will be ‘hidden’
from the views.

You can also adjust the severities of
incoming event reports, either to have to suppressed by a filter or to
make it more important. You can also set a suppression time to stop the
event being reported too often.

If you have scheduled downtime then
it may be a good idea to disable the replicataion probes, this is avoid
getting hundreds of reports of databases that didn’t replicate.

DDM can also correlate events from multiple
servers where the same event is generated by multiple servers.  One
little gotcha is never clcik CTRL-A in an embedded view as it will select
more then what’s displayed in the embedded view.

You can use the assign feature to inform
the correct person about an issue.  if you change the status yourself
then it is automatically assigned to you.

Events in DDM can have a status of Open,
Closed and Permanently Closed.  Closed events can be automatically
reopened by DDM is a change in severity is detected. If an event is permanently
closed then it can never be automatically reopened.

Server collections can have multiple
levels meaning less information for the right people to look at. The messaging
admin may only need to see the data from a small group of messaging servers.

Advanced Concepts

You may want to add a ‘By Database’
view to the ddm.nsf

Views in DDM.nsf are set for manual
updates so they open faster. You may need to hit F9 to get the latest data.

You may want to make a local replica
for faster access.

DDM automatically disables cluster replication
for DDM.nsf

You can also integrate event generators
into DDM.nsf like monitoring stats or ACl changes. The older iSpy probes
from R5/6 can also monitor old servers and report into ddm.nsf

In the Message Documents you can add
in extra causes and solutions. These may get over written with upgrades
but the custom comment will not be over written.  In teh correctove
actions you can write your own actions using either formula or lotusscript.

Check out the $Messages hidden view.
You can also create your own message documents for third party applications
that report to the console ( detect if you AV package failed to update
or something )

DEBUG_DDM=1 on the notes CLIENT will
expose a hidden subform at the bottom of event reports to assist in creating
your own probes etc.

What a night. If you managed to get to
the JamFest last night in the Swan Tent then I’m sure you will agree that
it was an amazing night. I was there with the camera and took a load of
pictures which are now available here.

If you missed the JamFest then you really
have to go tonight, they have promised to repeat the ‘SameTime’ song and
the ‘Lotusphere Blues’.