Desktop Policy settings document can be used for domino administrator to configure and enforce the user location document in Notes Client.

However as the default desktop policy settings document, it does not allow to pass down the all location document’s fields.

For example, “Recipient name type-ahead” field of location document cannot be configured in the default desktop policy settings document.

In that case,  There is sill the way to add the desired parameters into the default desktop policy settings document by editing server names.nsf with lotus designer.

Below is the information regarding desktop policy and location parameters.

You can use Desktop Policy settings documents to set field value in users' current Location documents.This can be done by adding a new field to the policy settings document using the Domino Designer. The new field must be named LocAllVariableName, where VariableName is the name of the field you are setting in the Location documents.

Original source: IBM – Using a Desktop Policy to set notes.ini and Location parameters.

Here is the step by step example for adding “Recipient name type-ahead”  into Desktop Policy settings document.

1. Open server names.nsf from Lotus Designer.
2. Open PolicyDesktop form from form list view.
3. Click Mail tab, and then create “LocAllNameLookupPref” field in anywhere you want.
4. Save the form. and then close Lotus Designer.
5. Open Domino Administrator, and then open Desktop Policy settings document. If you don’t have any Desktop Policy settings document, create it.
6. If you click Mail tab, then you should be able to see the field which you created. Put value 0 or 1 or 2.
7. Save Desktop Policy settings document.
8. Test by the user who this Desktop Policy is assigned. This new value is set on the assigned users’ clients the next time they authenticate with their home server.

It is really difficult to pinpoint one particular feature of the IBM Lotus Foundations Start server as the “killer app”.  Lotus Foundations comes with so many handy, crucial SMB tools and each and every one of them is important.  However, if I was forced to choose one feature I would probably have to choose backups.

You’re only as safe as your most recent, reliable backup.  Without a proper backup, you could find yourself spending hours re-inputting data, recreating a spreadsheet, updating your address book, etc…  We all know how important backups are, but it is often the last thing on our laundry list of business to dos.  And, even if you did regularly take backups, what is the probability that the backup was a reliable one?  How often do you really do test restores to make sure that what you backed up is actually intact?

What about disaster recovery?  Have you planned for the worst case scenario?  Sure, you’re performing backups, but are you making sure that recent backups are also being taken off-site to another location for disaster recovery purposes?  If you are, how recent are those off-site backups?

Sure, you could use an online backup service for disaster recovery.  However, that can become expensive as you amass more files and data.  If you wanted to restore from an online backup, it will take as long as the download speed of your Internet connection.  For gigabytes of data, a full restore could take hours or days.

The Lotus Foundations Start server appliance has integrated IBM’s Intelligent Disk Backup (IDB) technology into its backup toolbox.  IDB allows you to perform incremental backups as often as 15 minutes.   You can backup daily, weekly, or as often as you need to.  If you are backing up frequently, IDB also makes “incremental” copies of recently modified files.  So, if you modified a file an hour ago and the same file two hours ago, you are able to restore either file to your system with the click of a button.  This is very useful if you realize that the file you saved an hour ago was somehow corrupted or you erased important information from it right before saving it.

In addition, the backups are encrypted.  So, even if the backup drive were to fall into the wrong hands, the data is secure.

Finally, what happens if your main hard drive fails?  Well, you just push a button and all of the server configuration and software is restored in minutes.  No need to reinstall the operating system, re-configure your software, or re-assign rights to folders and printers.  The IDB  backs everything up, not just your data files.

What about disaster recovery?  If you buy additional IDB drive cartridges with the server, you merely need to pull out one cartridge at the end of the day on Friday, plug in your other cartridge and take the first cartridge home with you so the data is off-site.  The act of plugging in a new cartridge tells Lotus Foundations to start backing up the whole system from scratch automatically.  No need to let the IDB know about the new cartridge.  It is all taken care of automatically.

If the unthinkable happens, and your server at the office were to be lost in a calamity, you would only need to buy a new IBM server, plug in the cartridge that you took home with you, push a button and you’re right back where you started, since your last backup.

So, yes, IBM’s Intelligent Disk Backup technology that comes with the IBM Lotus Foundations Start server appliance is the bomb.  Finally, no more tapes, no more carrying around an external USB drive from PC to PC, and no more worrying about disaster recovery.  And best of all, no more shelling out monthly fees to continue making online backups.  Let the IDB take care of the backups for you so you can just sit back, relax and focus on work.

Lotus Protector for Mail Security is an appliance suitable for businesses who are looking to proactively protect their email systems from spam and viruses. This appliance comes in two flavors (deployment flexibility), as a hardware software combo appliance (Rack Unit : 2U) and as a virtual appliance using vmware.  Designed specifically for the Lotus Domino environment the appliance is very easy to setup on an existing Domino platform.

For evaluation purpose we chose to use the virtual appliance using VMWare server as it is easy to install on our existing vmware infrastructure. The vmware image is based on a linux OS and has the Lotus Protector software pre-installed. Once you have the Lotus Protector vmware image turned on, you will be guided through a series of configuration questions that took us about 20 minutes to configure. Nothing is better than a simple yet security rich management interface, and this appliance comes with it.

As soon as we opened the management interface we updated the licenses and made sure that the components (Content Filter Database, Appliance Firmware, Intrusion Prevention Signatures and AntiVirus Signatures) are up-to-date. We updated the time to sync with an external time server, made sure that the networking and firewall part is configured correctly and checked the Events for abnormalities.

The next step is to setup the appliance for LDAP access. In the Policy Objects under Directories, we added an entry to access our domino ldap server so that incoming mails can be verified against the mail field in the ldap directory. The trickiest part was to enter a username who has access to the ldap directory.  The correct format should be in LDIF format such as entering the DN into the Username field, in this case we entered “cn=FirstName LastName/o=OrganizationName”. We at first entered our Domino Short Name which didn’t work. We left everything by default except in the last tab “SMTP Domains” we added our domain. Next step is to setup a Who Objects in the Policy Objects section under the Who tab. Make sure that the type is “Directory” and choose the directory that we have previously setup. Once the changes have been saved, we can verify if the ldap directory is working by going to Verify Who Objects and choose All Who Objects. Click Submit. You should see an OK in the result column.

To verify an email address, simply select SMTP Address in the selection box and type in an exisiting email address.

The next step is to configure the Receiving SMTP setting so that the appliance can verify that a recipient actually exist in the Domino directory and what to do if the recipient is not found. There is also an option to silently drop the email if it is being addressed to an unknown recipient, however for our testing purpose we left it as Rejected with Error. This is nice to have when troubleshooting and testing a spam email from the Internet.

Once that is in place we can procede with the testing and here is the result when an exisiting user doesn’t exist

What about spam? To test this out I sent myself an email containing a simple text email that offers a viagra product. Here is the email sample so that you can use it for testing purpose too : Email. Immediatly Lotus Protector caught the email spam and quarantined it.

Another feature in Lotus Protector is the automatic updates of the following components required for the appliance to effectively filter spam which I believe are being updated often by IBM :

• Content Filter Database
• Bayes Filter Database
• Spam Heuristics
• AntiVirus Signatures
• Intrusion Prevention Signatures

Not to forget the reporting tools are awesome too,  Lotus Protector can create an executive summary report from a time period of your choosing. To name a few, reports can be categorized according to top 10 Viruses or top 10 senders to traffic monitoring to matched rules. This report also includes a very nice graph to help us to assess patterns and trends.

Wednesday appliance test

As I am only touching the surface, for more information regarding this appliance, please visit IBM’s website directly :

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/protector/mailsecurity/

Then if you like to see if this product suits you, there is a 90-day trial for this appliance. Follow the link : http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ls/lotusprotector/learn.html