Domino Blog

News, views and directions on IBM Lotus Domino

Directory changes in Domino 8

March 26 2007

We continue our tour of Domino 8's new features with a focus on Domino directory. Domino 8 includes some valuable improvements to established directory features as well a some brand new tool.

IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator
IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator(TDI) is a powerful and comprehensive administrative tool, that can help synchronize identity data between Lotus Domino and other repositories throughout your organization. It supports a wide variety of data sources including  NSF, LDAP, Active Directory, CSV, XML, DMSL, JDBC. With Lotus Domino 8, customers are granted an entitlement, or “right-to-use,” Tivoli Directory Integrator 6.1.1 in conjunction with Lotus Domino directory databases, at no additional cost to your Lotus Domino license. There is a helpful TDI Redbook available here if you want to really understand the product.

Directory lint (DirLint)
Lotus Domino 8 introduces a new tool, called DirLint, that scans a directory and reports on inconsistencies in the naming hierarchy, flags invalid syntax in directory names, and detects and reports problematic characters in directory names. It also scans group member lists to ensure that each member exists in an available directory that is configured in directory assistance.

Lotus Notes client version Domino directory view
A “People - by Client Version” view in the Lotus Domino 8 directory helps you quickly see what versions of Lotus Notes are deployed in your user community.

Authentication/authorization-only secondary directories
Directory assistance in Lotus Domino 8 enables you to specify when a secondary directory must only be used for authentication/authorization Internet authentication.  This avoids the overhead of unnecessary NAMELookups to authentication/authorization directories.

Improved configuration for directory assistance LDAP directories
The directory assistance form for configuring secondary LDAP directories has been improved in Lotus Domino 8. In order to minimize the adding of invalid entries, Suggest and Verify buttons have been added to the entry form.

Improved group membership expansion
Determining the groups to which a user belongs is very common use of directories, but often  a very resource-intensive task. With Lotus Domino 8, two new LDAP attributes are designed to allow a single search to return the entire nested group membership for a user.

Beyond Domino 8, much more is being planned for the next major Domino's release after including optional Microsoft Active Directory integration. Stay tuned to this blog for news on that topic.

Domino 6.5.6 is available

March 26 2007

Today we made available Lotus Domino 6.5.6 maintenance release. This is the last planned maintenance release of 6.5 x codestream (other than fixpacks and hotfixes). The release includes several features that were added in Domino 7.0.2 and will also be included in Domino 8

• Microsoft Exchange TNEF conversion (including the TNEF MIME update which was made available in 7.0.2 FP1).
• Journaling group name expansion.
•  We have also tested that SmartUpgrade Run As Admin utility works with 6.5.6 install kits.

More details of these capabilities were describe in this previous Domino 7.0.2 blog article.

New platforms supported by Domino 6.5.6 include i5/OS V5R4 and Internet  Explorer 7 for Domino Web Access email access.

The complete Notes/Domino fix list history is posted here.

Press announcement of Domino 8 beta

March 15 2007

As a regular reader of this blog, you already know its here, but  this is the public press release on the availability of Notes Domino 8 public beta. There are some great stats on downloads and quotes.

Full press release can be found here

Domino 8 Linux info and poll

March 13 2007

We've already seen a large number of Linux downloads of the Domino 8 beta code and answered a few questions on the beta forum. We should clarify that we do plan to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux RHEL 5 as well as Novell SUSE 10 with Domino 8. The beta release notes do not mention Redhat because we ran out of time to test the new OS version in time for this beta.

We do encourage you to test Domino 8 on RHEL5  (beta) and provide reports of any issues or bugs  you uncover in our beta forum - not here!

I would also be interested in a quick poll of people who are choosing Linux for Domino.

1) Which OS are you moving away from for Linux?
2) Is RHEL or SUSE is your preferred choice or vendor?

Notes/Domino 8 Reviewer’s guide

March 9 2007

If you have already downloaded the Domino 8 beta code, you hopefully have also noticed the great new Notes and Domino 8 Reviewer's Guide.  If you are not quite ready to try the software or waiting for the download to complete (or just need a break from Daylight Savings Time issues),  go ahead and download the reviewers guide here. Its full of great information on Domino 8 in the Administrators and Developers in the respective chapters and of course Notes 8.

We will continue to complement this document and the product documentation with ongoing articles here

Domino/Notes 8 beta is available

March 9 2007

The first 'public beta' of Domino 8 and Notes 8 just went live. To download the beta, you should visit the Notes and Domino 8 beta home page. The following Domino platforms are available on the public beta site.

• Domino 8 server for Windows
• Domino 8 server for AIX
• Domino 8 server for Linux
• Domino 8 server for Solaris
• Domino 8 server for System i

The Domino team will be monitoring the beta discussion forum to address individual problems, but we will continue to post general Domino 8 news and information here.

AdminP performance in Domino 8

March 1 2007

This is part 2 of the Domino 8 performance improvements write-up.

The administration process (AdminP) task automates many of the administrative tasks required to manage a Lotus Domino environment. In Lotus Domino 8, many enhancements have been introduced to aimed at improving  the efficiency of this process in order to reduce the system resource requirements and speed up the completion of tasks.

Post request into target server database  ("Direct deposit")
With prior versions of Lotus Domino, administration requests are placed into the“Administration Requests” database, (ADMIN4.NSF), on the Lotus Domino server on which they are created, and then replication is used to transfer the request to the server where it will be processed. In an environment with many servers, it may take several replication events before the request reaches the server that will process the request.

In Lotus Domino 8, AdminP can deposit selected administration requests directly into a destination server's administration requests database instead of depositing the request into the local copy of the database. This has the potential to reduce the time taken to start and therefore complete the processing of these administration requests.

User rename speed improvements
There are occasions when a user’s hierarchical name may need to be changed, either due to a change in surname or a change in the organizational hierarchy to which the user belongs. In this situation, it is necessary to ensure that this change is reflected in any design element (Reader Name field, Author Name field, ACL) that contains the original name, in order that the user will still have the same access to information with their new name. In a Lotus Domino domain with many databases, this process can consume considerable time and system resources.

With Lotus Domino 8, the processing of the user rename administration request has the potential to be more much faster and more efficient by using a new names list that can be stored in a database. This names list contains the names of all the reader names entries and author names entries that are present within the database. Instead of immediately searching every note in a database, a quick check can be done to identify whether a particular name appears in this list. Only if a name is found in the list, is every note in the database searched to identify all the fields where the name is stored, and to replace these with the new name.

Critical request scheduling
In a large Lotus Domino domain, the administration process is likely to have many tasks to process some of which may be of a higher priority than others. Lotus Domino 8 offers new features to give extra processing capability to particular tasks in order to speed up their completion.

Change scheduled request
You can specify the time interval, other than the default time interval, in which a specific type of administration request will execute and this value will override the default settings. For example you could set a request like “Rename in Person Documents” which is, by default a daily request, to instead run as an immediate request.

Dedicated Domino threads for immediate and interval requests
By default there is no prioritizing of administration requests. They are queued in the order in which they are created, and each of them is assigned a general Domino processing thread when one becomes available. In Lotus Domino 8, you can assign special purpose threads to two classes of administration request -- “immediate” requests and “interval” requests. These special purpose threads will now run concurrently alongside general process threads, potentially reducing the time taken to complete those tasks.

Domino 8 performance improvements

February 26 2007

As our Domino development team rapidly approaches a key milestone, the availability of public beta for Domino 8 (due VERY soon), we are starting today to publish more details to help your planning. We hope you will want to download to code and participate as soon as we make the Domino 8 beta available. Today we'll look at performance and efficiency improvements.

Domino 7 delivered improvements in performance with most of the focus around reducing CPU requirements by between 25-50%. In Domino 8, there are a number of further performance and other improvements that can potentially allow you servers run even more efficiently, without hardware upgrades. Here are some of the more visible and valuable improvements. We hope you will want to take advantage of them:
 

• Design note compression
• Streaming cluster replication
• On-demand collations
• Prevent simple search
• Admin process (Admin P) improvements

Design note compression
The option to use design note compression has been added to Lotus Domino 8 to help reduce the I/O and the space utilization associated with design information. The compression, which is transparent to Notes applications, typically reduces the size of a design note by as much as 60% (based on preliminary test results we have seen in Domino labs).

Streaming cluster replication
You could consider this to be Domino's 2nd generation of clustering capability, making Notes client fail-over even better. In order to improve cluster replication performance and reduce the overhead that this can have on server I/O, Lotus Domino 8 introduces the concept of streaming cluster replication. Cluster replication is used to ensure that replica databases in a cluster are as up-to-date as possible in order to support fail over and load balancing of servers. In Domino 8, it is event-driven, rather than schedule-driven, so when a cluster replicator learns of a change to a database, it immediately pushes that change to other replicas in the cluster, meaning that data is very up to date on all cluster-mates.

With prior versions of Lotus Domino, the replicator constantly checked each database in turn to identify whether there were changes to replicate and then would replicate all changes associated with one database before moving onto the next. With Lotus Domino 8, servers propagate events (note updates, folder additions and removals, unread mark operations) to destination servers as they occur. Streaming cluster replication coordinates with existing scheduled replication to reduce its overhead, and it updates replication history periodically to reduce the burden on the regular replicator.

On-demand collations
With Lotus Notes and Domino 8, application developers can reduce the unnecessary server load from creating indices for columns that are not being used by deferring the creation of these indices until the user first chooses to sort the view by a specific column.

Prevent simple search
This new database property “Don't allow simple search” positively impacts server performance by preventing users from searching databases that do not have full-text search enabled. By default, users can always search a database that does not have a full text index but there is a significant impact on the server when this type of ad hoc search is carried out. The new property can prevent users from accidentally selecting a given database as a target of a search and thus impacting server performance.

Admin process improvements
The administration process (AdminP) task automates many of the administrative tasks required to manage a Lotus Domino environment. In Lotus Domino 8, many enhancements have been introduced to improve the efficiency of this process to reduce the resource requirements and speed up the completion of tasks. There are so many improvements in AdminP area that we will cover this in more detail in a follow on article...

DST interview podcast

February 14 2007

More info on Daylight Savings Time. Scott Vrusho is the manager in charge of the Domino development team who are building the solution for the Daylight Savings Time (DST) issue. A new podcast interview with Scott on the topic is posted  on the IdoNotes blog and can be found here.

Domino update site podcast

February 8 2007

Bruce Elgort  has posted a new podcast featuring Thomas Gumz talking about a number of Domino admin topics on Bruce and Julian Robichaux's Taking Notes site. Thomas talks about the Domino admin client Domino Domain Monitoring. (Thomas was one of the authors of the Domino Domain Monitoring redpaper).

Thomas also discusses his latest project, the new Domino 8 Eclipse update site provisioning capability. This allows your to provision new features and plug-ins to Notes 8 and other Eclipse based clients like Sametime 7.5. If you missed his Lotusphere presentation (ID211), this is a good summary of the new capability.

The podcast is here.