[Editor's note: This is the second article in a series of three on how to use the Domino Administration process. This second article provides a roadmap of common Administration process requests and describes how Domino goes about completing some of its more extensive series of requests. The first article focused on how to set up the Administration process in your domain. The third article provides tips and guidelines to help you use the Administration process to its full advantage.]
Overview
The Administration Process helps make system administration easy by automating specific administration tasks. For example, you can choose a rename person action in the Public Address Book and the Administration Process on various servers takes care of changing that name throughout the databases in the domain.
To accomplish a specific administrative task, the Administration Process posts and responds to requests in the Administration Requests database (ADMIN4.NSF). For some tasks -- for example, creating replicas -- the Administration Process posts only one or two requests. However, other tasks -- for example renaming people -- involve a more complex series of requests and interactions between servers and people.
The goal of this article, the second in a series of three on the Administration Process, is to shed light on how the Administration Process goes about completing some of its more extensive series of requests. The tasks discussed are:
For each of these tasks, we provide a flowchart showing the series of requests involved followed by details on the "how, why, when, and where" of each request.
Flowcharts
Each flowchart shows:
- The series of requests the Administration Process carries out to complete a specific task.
- When each request is carried out. The processing times are the defaults--you can change the default timing using the settings in the Administration Process section of the Server document in the Public Address Book.
Details
After each flowchart are details on the "how, why, when, and where" of each request, formatted as follows:
- Triggered by: Describes what causes the Administration Process to create the request.
- Posted on: Describes the server that posts the request.
- Carried out on: Describes the server that carries out the request.
- Carried out: Indicates which setting in the Administration Process section of the Server document controls when the request is carried out or indicates if an administrator's approval causes the request to be carried out.
- Result: Describes what happens when the Administration Process completes the request.
Keep in mind that this article doesn't describe all the tasks you can accomplish with the Administration Process, only the ones that trigger several requests. In addition to the tasks mentioned above, you can also use the Administration Process to create mail files, synchronize resources between the Resource Reservations database and the Public Address Book, enable directory assistance, enable password checking, create replicas of databases, and add servers to and remove them from clusters. For additional information on all Administration Process tasks, see the Lotus Notes Administrator's Guide.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kendra Bowker earned a certificate in technical writing from Middlesex Community College in Bedford, Massachusetts. She has worked as a software technical writer for six years, the last four at Lotus. Kendra joined Lotus originally as a release notes writer and now contributes to the Lotus Domino Administrator's Guide.
Copyright 1997 Iris Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.