Lotus/Domino Client Replication Monitoring
We have a variety of databases (8, belonging to a CRM) replicating to users out in the field, so that they can do CRM tasks (i.e. Sales Calls) when offline or on an airplane.
Is there any way of relatively easy way to monitor who is replicating what and when? We ultimately need to be able to confirm that the DBs are being replicated to the users, for a variety of liability and responsibility reasons (remote salespeople often claim they can't perform CRM function X or Y, because the local database isn't present, because it's not replicating). Currently, we manage all of this manually, and remotely connect to the laptops occasionally to double-check settings. With a dozen international users spread across the world, this is very time consuming and impracticle for obvious reasons.
What's more, every time we want to start using a new feature of the CRM, this requires yet another replication to be set up by hand, which again is a pain to do for remote users.
This is starting to be a real pain in the neck for end-users, IT staff, and management, who are really starting to question Lotus' prowess (seeing as replication is theoretically one of Lotus' big/strong selling points). Admittedly, myself and the in-house IT staff are fairly new to Lotus, coming from other environments (Exchange/Groupwise) that tend to "just work". We're running Lotus 7.0.2FP1 on the server and 7.0.3 on the clients.
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ASKED:
February 11, 2010 4:44 PM
UPDATED:
February 17, 2010 5:28 PM
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If I understand the request properly, you are wondering if there is an easy way “to force” a local replica of a database on to a user’s machine, and replicate it so they have it. Then also, track whether or not they are actually replicating the database and using it. Is that correct?
More or less, yes. Ideally, the server would be pushing/forcing replications of databases X, Y, and Z to various users or groups. Currently, this is not happening, so a lot of manual setup of replications needs to happen to each individual user – a royal pain the in rear. Not to mention, if we want to replicate a new database for whatever reason, we have to remote into every laptop and set it up manually (for a variety of reasons, our users can’t be trusted to set up these replications themselves – it IT group has to be able to personally verify that each replication is functioning).
Surely, there must be a way to automate this relatively easily. What would a company of 2000 users do in this case?
This might help.
From Admin help (R6):
Policies
Using a policy, you control how users work with Notes. A policy is a document that identifies a collection of individual policy settings documents. Each of these policy settings documents defines a set of defaults that apply to the users and groups to which the policy is assigned. Once a policy is in place, you can easily change a setting, and it will automatically apply to those users to whom the policy is assigned.
… and …
Desktop — Use desktop policy settings control and update the user’s desktop environment or to reinforce setup policy settings. For example, if a change is made to any of the policy settings, the next time users authenticate with their home server, the desktop policy settings restore the default settings or distribute new settings specified in the desktop policy settings document.
R8:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/xpViewRecent.xsp?searchValue=policies
I suggest training.
IBM Self Training:
Self-Training: Troubleshooting Domino policies and settings documents
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg27010353
Not sure if your specific training need is addressed here, but at least a start on getting training resources.
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/training/spnotesdomino.html
Also, go to tlcc.com. Excellent Lotus Notes/Domino training courses.
If you have not looked into this there are some tools out there that can help you with this.
Panagenda’s Marvel Client being one of them. It can be used to manage local Notes settings and Local replicas is but one of these……
http://www.panagenda.com/index.php/products/marvelclient
and no I dont work for them