Category Archives: SmartCloud
SmartCloud Tip #04: Special considerations for Soft Deletions with MMR
The SmartCloud administration panel has a setting for how long deleted messages are in the trash. From the administration screen, in the left navigation click on IBM SmartCloud Notes, Click Account Settings…
Click Email Management.
This setting overrides the setting in the database properties – advanced tab – soft deletions.
However…
If your users are using Managed Mail Replicas (MMR), then they have a local replica and the Notes client will still process soft deletions on that local replica according to the database setting. So if the database setting is set shorter than what you have in the SmartCloud admin settings, the trash will be emptied locally and then replicated to the server and it will appear as though the server setting isn’t working.
Normally the administrator could change this database setting, but not for mail files in SmartCloud because no one has manager access to the database, not even to the local replica.
To avoid this problem, simply make sure to set the value of the soft deletions database property to something longer than the time you have set in SmartCloud up to 2160 hours (90 days) before you migrate the mail file to SmartCloud. Don’t exceed that as excessively high values create other problems. Also do this to the mail template you are using for new users.
The beauty of cloud-based software is the speed that updates are deployed and I expect this will change soon. IBM is working on refinements to managing the soft deletions with MMRs, but it is still best to deal with this pro-actively before migrating.
Read these articles for more tips on preparing mail files for migration to SmartCloud Notes:
SmartCloud Tip #02: Best Practices to get mail files ready to move to SmartCloud
SmartCloud Tip #03: Important Details to Setting the ACL on your Mail Files
SmartCloud Tip #03: Important Details to Setting the ACL on your Mail Files
When you move to SmartCloud Notes, you get many great benefits, but of course there are a few tradeoffs. One of those is giving up Manager access to the mail files. Whether you’re the mail file owner or the system administrator, the best access you’ll ever have is Editor. And unless you explicitly configure it otherwise, by default only the mail file owner will have any access at all. This is actually great for enforcing best practices. Users should never have more than editor access anyway, and in countries like France, the law prohibits administrators from accessing a user’s mail without their permission. Yes, the owner can always use delegation to grant others access to their mail file, but that only works if they are available to give that access. That doesn’t help for employees that are out sick or no longer employed at your company.
If you want anything other than the default, you need to plan ahead because once the mail file has been migrated, you can’t change the ACL. This means adding certain groups and roles to the ACL of the existing mail files as well as to the template for any future mail files.
There are typically 3 groups you will want to add to the ACL. The first is your administrator group. Without this, administrators can’t perform some basic administrator tasks, like opening the mail file to do troubleshooting.
The second group that may need access are support personnel who may need access to the mail files, but should not be included in your administrator group. For example, this may be regional administrators, or designated people on the help desk, or HR, or the legal department. How you organize these groups will vary depending on the organization and size of your company. Note that you need a different mail template in SmartCloud for each different ACL. For example, you will need a different template for each region if each region will have a different group of regional administrators.
The third consideration is providing access for your application servers in the event you have applications that run agents that directly touch the mail files. Keep in mind that no agents can run on directly on the SmartCloud mail servers so any agents will need to be run on a server you maintain on site. Typically databases use mail routing to get things into your mail file, but I have encountered a few applications that add entries directly to the calendar. The process of assigning access to these groups is simple, but must be done in advance of migrating the mail files into SmartCloud and also requires modifying the ACL of your mail template that will be posted in SmartCloud so future accounts created in the cloud will have them.
First, create a role called ExcludeDelegate in the ACL of the mail files, then create the three groups mentioned above as you need and apply that role to them. (More on exactly how to do this later.) The following screen shot was taken from the database catalog and shows these ACL entries framed in red boxes. Note that regardless of what level of access you give these groups in the mail file on site, it will not have more than Editor when it is moved to the cloud. But if those entries do not have the ExcludeDelegate role applied, they will be removed entirely from the ACL upon migration.
Entries needed in SmartCloud ACL
So how do you get these settings applied to all of your mail files in advance? You could add the entries using the administrator client. On the files tab, select a set databases then right click and choose Access Control – Manage. A dialog box displays that allows adding, modifying, or deleting ACL entries. It also allows creating roles. But the ability to actually applying those roles to ACL entries is missed. (I say BUG, IBM says “functioning as designed”) So the only way to assign a role to an ACL entry via the Administrator UI is to manually open each database one at a time and add the role to the entry. Not exactly convenient when trying to assign the [ExcludeDelegate] role to entries in hundreds or thousands of mail files before migrating them to SmartCloud.
Footnote: An SPR# GPKS6TNBN4 is a request to fix the admin client to mass-update roles in ACLs. Read this article for more details:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21264880
Please take a moment to open a ticket with IBM technical support and request that your company be added to this SPR. The more companies that request an enhancement, the more urgent they consider it.
Meanwhile, you can accomplish this using third party tools, such as Ytria EZ ACL tool, a module in the suite of useful admin tools. (Contact me for a discount code) or you can write an agent to accomplish this task.
Prepare your environment with these steps well in advance of migrating and things will be much less complicated at the time of migration.
If you found this tip helpful, you might also be interested in my other tips:
SmartCloud Tip #01 Using the Notes admin client to compliment the SmartCloud web admin screens
SmartCloud Tip #02: Best Practices to get mail files ready to move to SmartCloud
Computer gaming companies are choosing IBM over Amazon
A few weeks ago I mentioned on the first day of IBM Connect conference that it is clear now beyond any doubt that computing power is becoming the next utility like electricity, phone, water, and cable TV. I predict that there will come a day in the very near future when few companies will still have their own physical data center.
This article at thestreet.com is more proof of that as the gaming industry is the first to make this move. But even more interesting is that IBM, not Amazon, Google or Microsoft, is leading this trend. This adds even more credibility to IBM SmartCloud for Social Business and why I see it eclipsing Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps in the coming years as businesses of all sizes seek more business-directed solutions than what those consumer-focused, consumer-driven businesses (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) can provide.
SmartCloud Tip #02: Best Practices to get mail files ready to move to SmartCloud
Here are several essential tips to avoid users having problems after migrating users’ mail to SmartCloud and to avoid having problems during the migration.
1. First, make an initial pass with the Onboarding Planning Tool (OPT) as early in the migration planning process as possible. You will want to get a jumpstart on fixing all the errors it is going to find that you never knew you had. This will also help to identify all those orphaned accounts no longer in use so you can get a more accurate count of how many licenses you need.
2. Look at the mail files on your server with the admin client. Sort them by size. If you have any over 5 GB, then open each and see how many documents are in the inbox. If you have a lot of these, make an agent to scan them all and create a report. For any that have more than about 1000 messages in the inbox you should have the owner clean it up before they are migrated. This is a performance issue.
3. Identify all mail files that have more than 400 folders. These will need to be reduced to under 400. Again, it is a performance issue and can also cause errors. Finding these isn’t as easy. If you are a glutton for punishment, you can do it manually. Open the server log, go to the view Usage – By Size. Open the document for one of the mail databases and you will find a list of all the folders. An easy way to count them is to copy the list and paste it into a spreadsheet or into an editor that will display line numbers, like Notepad++, a great, free editor. I recommend creating an agent or using a 3rd party tool like Ytria tools instead. (Contact me and I can get you a discount.)
In case you’re wondering, I’ve already asked IBM to add processing counting the inbox documents and the number of folders to the OPT. It is more likely to happen sooner if others request it too.
4. If you aren’t already using local mail replicas and managing them with MMR, then you are best off getting this setup on all users before you start migrating. You can do it after the migration as well, but creating the replicas will take longer because it is pulling it down from the Internet instead of from servers in your data center. Do NOT try to do it at the same time you migrate users. You will inevitably have problems and it will give the impression the migration was the cause. For users with excessively large mail files or with a high document count in their inbox, create the local replica first and have them do their clean up work locally. If you use the MMR settings on the Mail tab of the Desktop Policy settings, you can also tell it to create the full text index automatically too. Your users will be thankful. Be sure to teach them how to use it too!
These tips aren’t documented in the IBM SmartCloud Wiki.
But there are many good lessons to learn there if you are considering making the move. Check out the Learning Center pages on the SmartCloud wiki
SmartCloud Tip #01 Using the Notes admin client to compliment the SmartCloud web admin screens
This is my first in a series of tips regarding SmartCloud Hybrid Notes migrations and administering SmartCloud Hybrid Notes environments that aren’t always obvious.
First, as a user, I will say that the more I use SmartCloud Notes, the more I like it. Yes, when doing administration tasks I keep bumping into walls that, as an experienced administrator, I wish weren’t there. But I have seen the problems that a bad or malicious administrator can reek on a system given the opportunity and I am thankful for the excessively tight security. After all, one of the biggest reasons to go to SmartCloud is so you don’t have to administer mail servers, right?
Tip #01 – How to use the Notes Administrator client to compliment the SmartCloud Web administration screens:
As usual, the system administrators are the last ones to get a UI that makes sense. No surprise since there is only 1 administrator for every few thousand end users. The SmartCloud Web Administration screens aren’t very efficient and can be downright frustrating to use at times, especially when you are accustomed to using the Notes Administrator client.
For example, let’s say you have a mixture of mail templates in use and you need to move everyone using one template to a different one. There is no way to see what template is applied to each mail file via the web admin interface. At this time it simply can’t be done. But you can use your Notes Admin client to find them. While the SmartCloud servers won’t show up in the list of servers in your domain and you can’t view the directory in SmartCloud to add those servers in bulk, from the pulldown menu select File – Open Server and enter the server name to gain limited access to the server. The SmartCloud servers will even appear in the Open Server dialog list if you have opened mail files on them already. Be sure to bookmark your SmartCloud servers in your favorites too, so you don’t have to go through this process every time.
Now that you have the server open, you can go to the Files tab and see more details on your users’ mail files including the templates applied. The directory structure they use in SmartCloud is designed to accommodate a multi-tenant environment. So you will want to know where to find your mail files. It’s not too hard because you can’t see any databases you shouldn’t have access to. The directory structure works like this: In the root there will be the directories Data0, Data1, Data2, Data3. You can ignore the Data0 directory as no mail files are in there. Each of these directories contain the following subdirectories:
12345678 (your customer ID) – location of the mail files for users that have this server designated as their mail server
lost+found – used for maintenance
s\12345678 – location of mail files where this server is the user’s secondary server in the cluster
While there aren’t many actions you can take here, it does make it easier to do tasks like open mail files for troubleshooting, view the database properties, see who is approaching their quota, etc.
The Notes Guy in Seattle 