BP104 Worst Practices in IBM Lotus Domino Environments - Learning From the Mistakes of Others

(Monday, January 22) - This was one of the more memorable session from last year, that I looked forward to seeing again. Bill is back with Paul to go over some of the harrowing experiences that have occurred in their world of administering and developing in Lotus. Bill represented the developer issue and Paul the admins. Their delivery of the content is mainly for fun, but they point out they are actual experiences (with the names of guilty parties removed, although hinted at on several occasions, but appeared to mainly be inside jokes) and can be learned from.

Another version of one of the most successful presentations from Lotusphere 2006 - updated with new stories. We'll lead you through the top 20 mistakes seen in live Lotus Domino environments, both from an infrastructure and an application development point of view. All of these mistakes have cost companies around the globe significant amounts of support and downtime costs -- and all could have been prevented. Common mistakes (such as not actually reading documentation), to lack of change control and training, right up to absolute disasters caused by a chain of successive mistakes are de-constructed. This highly amusing session will show you how to avoid making these mistakes in your environment.

The session was as captivating as last year, so I was only able to jot some brief notes. See the slides for some of the revealing information, but for now here are the items I was able to get down:

1. Configure your Anti-Virus software to exclude the Notes Data directory. The evidence was of a Client's mail "disappearing" every Friday. It seems that the scheduled av program had designated the mail as a virus and guaranteed it leaving it inaccessible. A corollary, leave transactions logs and view index temp directories also excluded as they are potential targets for av programs. If needed look to getting AV specific for Lotus.
2. Full Access Admin allows access to readers fields, be mindful of who has access to Full Admin rights.
3. User's were wondering why their Email was not routing... an attempt was made to "share a video" via email attachment...it was a half GB in size ...to 428 people...Notes would have eventually handled it, but it brought the servers "to its knees". Rules are available to set the max message size.
4. Black Berry users out of office (OOO) setting defaults to the last date used. This example had 200+ out of offices notices going out from the individual after not using OOO for 2 years on black berry.
5. A notes about about a clean up agent in DomLog.nsf...(check slides for further information)

One of the sites briefly mentioned that users can submit their own "worst practice" experience can be found at the following link.

Lotusphere Worst Practices Site