August 21st, 2005
The Administration Process
The Administration Process (AdminP) seems
to a lot of people to be one of the great mysteries on Domino. Often,
it is ignored, left on its on to do whatever its supposed to do - until
it breaks. Sometime, a broken AdminP can be painful. However,
much like heart attacks, you can generally prevent AdminP flameouts with
a little care ahead of time.
Kathleen
and I bid on a chance to talk about AdminP this year at Lotusphere, thinking
that we'd get turned down because nobody cared. We were shocked when
we not only got accepted, but got one of the 'big' rooms, and were even
further shocked that a whole lot of people showed up! (Especially
considering that we were the morning session after the theme park trip.)
We started to think that we were on to something, that people DO
care about lowly old AdminP.
Here's why I think you suddenly care. After years of being a tool
to manage name changes and deletions, AdminP is now required for things
like the CA process, Roaming users, policies and a lot of the really cool
things that Notes 6 offers. I've been meaning to blog about it for
a while, but when my new job offered me the opportunity to write about
it officially, that seemed to be the way to go.
I got out there to see what existed, and you know what? There's a
bunch of it already there - and its good stuff. Sorather than re-invent
too many wheels, I wrote the Frequently
Asked Questions - The Administration Process (AdminP)
document to pull together existing
work - and add a few best practices. To help supplement this document,
I also pulled together a somewhat more dynamic document, a Knowledge Collection
- Knowledge
Collection - The Administration Process in Domino 6.0x and 6.5x.
This
latter document will change as Technotes are written or retired.
As Kathleen and I said at Lotusphere, Admin4.nsf replication problems are
the number one cause for big issues with AdminP. The documents and
links here contain the settings and the advice needed to avoid these problems.
The Administration Process is powerful, but the system needs to be
given the attention that you give the rest of your Domino system.
Since the Support website doesn't allow one-on-one questions, feel free
to ask them here as you read the documents. 'I'll answer any
questions you post.....
But please - if the documents are helpful to you, fill out that survey
down at the bottom - they DO read those.
