Understand and implement a local mail copy of IBM Lotus Notes

The flexibility and freedom offered by replication are unmatched advantages of using IBM Lotus Notes. Many organizations choose to take advantage of this powerful feature on a 24x7 basis and configure their users to use a local copy of the Notes database, including the mail database.

In addition to the points discussed in the previous article, Lotus Notes/domino adds additional features that make it more appealing to implement local mail replicas. This article discusses these new enhancements and recommends some ways to set up local mail replicas. Before interpreting the local replica model and technical details that are relevant to setting up this environment within your infrastructure, let's look at an example of the applicability of a model.

Implementing an example of a local message copy

Each environment has special requirements and it is therefore difficult to provide a set of criteria or recommendations that can be applied to all agencies. The following example will assist you in developing a successful plan for deploying local mail replicas.

XYZ Company has deployed a Lotus Domino mail server for each new zone because it is a standard configured configuration and most sites with fewer than 25 users use low bandwidth. Most e-mail communications within a company occur between regions, and few e-mail messages are exchanged between users in the same office. Over time, the number of Lotus Domino mail servers outside the central location in the environment increased to 37, serving about 1,400 users, while the Lotus Domino mail server with two clusters at Headquarters served 2,900 users. The company's finance department raises questions about the number of servers and the number of licenses required to run an electronic messaging environment. To reduce the number of servers and licenses required, while still providing high availability and load balancing, the IT department decided to relocate a subset of the users to the Center office and implement a local mail copy.

The IT team assesses the company's current usage patterns, determining the server location, the number of users, and the available bandwidth. Table 1 defines the following categories.

Table 1. Evaluation of current usage patterns

Number of sites in the environment	Number of users	Available bandwidth	Recommended actions
11	Less than 25 people		Focus
1	25–50 a user	Less than 256 KB	Centralized (monitoring)
7	25–50 a user	Greater than 256 KB	Focus
2	50–150 a user	Less than 1 MB	Server that deploys the cluster
13	50–150 a user	Greater than 1 MB	Focus
3	More than 150 users		Server that deploys the cluster

Based on the results of the assessment, the IT department decided to centralize 32 sites in its environment into the two cluster servers at Headquarters and deploy five additional servers to the site where the server continues to be maintained. This reduces the total number of servers from 39 to 14 and provides a highly available and load-balanced environment for all users.

Top IT leaders require that all users in the environment use a set of same access methods. To achieve this, the IT team developed customized Setup and Desktop policies to automate the deployment process. Before making a decision to migrate to a local message copy, the environment contains a Desktop policy and a Setup policy. To ensure that a request to replicate data to end users does not cause this environment to overload, the IT team develops the Setup and Desktop policies for each location so that they can control the replication process. By moving the focus to a local mail copy, by implementing a set of policies for each server, the IT team shifted its focus to a smaller number of Setup and Desktop policies.

The IT team reduced the number of servers after the environment was moved to a local mail copy. The reduction in the number of servers and the implementation of the cluster allow maintenance on the server without any downtime for the user. This improves the user's overall satisfaction with the environment.

Description of replication to the local mail database

We often hear people talking about local mail and server-based Mail. What the hell does that mean? Local mail database replication refers to obtaining a copy of his or her mail file on a user's workstation, allowing users to use their e-mail messages without having to connect to the server. Sends outgoing e-mail messages at periodic intervals, while copying the mail files on the server to exchange any changes between the two databases. The description of the environment configuration is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Local Mail Copy environment configuration

To create this type of environment, you need to configure certain settings on the user's Lotus Notes client.

A copy of the user mail database must be created on the user's workstation. Directory catalogs are highly recommended for users to find names when addressing mail messages locally. You, an administrator, or a user can manually create a local copy from a user's workstation or using the Lotus Notes/domino policy. Once you have created a local replica and catalog catalog, you must set it up to replicate using the server copy of these databases to maintain synchronized modifications. We recommend a replication of these databases every 30 minutes. Configuring the replication operation to occur once every 30 minutes ensures that the client does not degrade server and client performance because of too frequent replication operations.

The Lotus Notes user performance on the workstation must be set to check for new messages on the server. This performance should be set to check every 5 minutes, which allows the user to receive messages at intervals that are far less than the 30-minute replication interval. This will ensure that the client maintains an open session with the Domino server and receives frequent notification of new mail.

The Lotus Notes client on the user's workstation must also specify the local copy of the user's mail file as the location for the action e-mail message. In addition, you must make some modifications to the client configuration to specify the local directory catalog to use when addressing mail messages. With these modifications, users can seamlessly operate on their local replicas and have an experience that is very close to operating on the server.

This appears to be a user or you have manually made some modifications on the user's workstation. Although manual configuration is a choice, you can also create policies to complete these modifications in the Lotus Notes/domino environment without having to access individual workstations. Because policies allow you to reconfigure a large number of workstations at the same time, you should pay extra attention to the granular expansion of these modifications so that requests to create a copy of the mail file and catalog catalogs suddenly flock to the network.

Enhancements to the use of local mail replicas

Many organizations prefer their users to use local mail replicas for a variety of reasons. But from a management standpoint, there are often many drawbacks to this configuration. These disadvantages are related to workstation configuration, user training, and providing directory services to users. Since the new Lotus Notes (V6.0 and later) have improved on replication, policy, and catalog cataloging, local mail replicas are easier to manage.

Network compression

Starting with Lotus Notes 6.x, the replication has been significantly modified, thus greatly increasing the speed and efficiency of network use. If network traffic is not compressed through routers or VPN software, the introduction of replication compression reduces the amount of data between the client and the server to 30-40%.

Streaming replication

In addition, the Lotus Notes V6.0 introduces streaming replication. This feature improves the user experience when using a local mail copy. When you copy, the new document is copied to the local mail copy in the order of the small to large. This eliminates the need to wait for many other mail messages when you first copy a single message with a large attachment. When you copy a document to a local mail database, streaming replication also allows the user to view and use the documents, so you do not have to wait until all the modified replications are complete before using the new message.

Asynchronous notification

Starting with the Lotus Notes v6.5.x Edition, asynchronous notifications are introduced. If the Notes client is used with a local mail copy and is open to the Domino server, the Domino server sends a new mail message to the client. Notifications sent by the Domino server trigger the Notes client to copy the message file and bring the new message to the local message copy. The replication does not require user intervention and does not depend on the replication progress set in the Lotus Notes client. This feature allows users to receive incoming mail messages while using a local copy.

Strategy

Introduced policies to assist you in configuring and maintaining settings on the user's workstation. This powerful feature gives you a lot of flexibility when configuring a user's workstation. By using policies, you can set the entire configuration settings, which are the settings necessary for users to use a local mail copy, without having to access the user station. This article will show you how to set up a policy to manage the scenario later.

Catalog Catalogs

While improvements in replication and policy are powerful features, the key to successfully implementing a user's local mail copy is to create a catalog catalog. You can create two types of catalog catalogs.

Compressed or Portable Catalog catalogs

A Portable Catalog catalog contains user and group entries from the Domino directory and other directories that you select. The Portable catalog catalog compresses entries for directories selected in the Catalog catalog database. The default rate for compressing entries is approximately 255 records in Domino directory (1 equivalent to 1 user or group entries) compressed to 1 records in a portable catalog catalog. The catalog catalog is therefore very small and can only be sorted by last name or first name, and the sorting method must be specified when the catalog catalog is created.

Extended Catalog Catalogs

An extended catalog catalog is based on the user, group, and server entries in Domino directory and other directories that you specify. An extended Catalog catalog provides uncompressed entries, so the catalog catalog is much larger than a portable catalog catalog. However, because the catalog catalog does not contain Connection directories, program directories, and so on, it is smaller than Domino directory. It is also very flexible in finding users, looking the same way as Domino Directory (that is, searching for first name, first name, initials, and so on).

A key factor in user satisfaction when working with local mail replicas is that users who work offline can find names in the directory. There are advantages and disadvantages to the portable catalogue cataloging and the extended catalog cataloging. Portable catalog catalogs are relatively small, while extended catalog catalogs provide more flexible lookup capabilities. You should select a catalog catalog that is appropriate for your environment based on the size of the catalog catalog. If an extended catalog catalog is created and is greater than MB, a portable catalog catalog is used. The decision point between the directory size used as the two catalog catalog types takes two factors into account, on the one hand, the time the user spends on the replicated directory, and the other is the growth of the directory.

Now that we've discussed the key factors in the environment using local mail replicas, let's look at how to create and configure the environment.

Configuring the Environment

To enable users to successfully use local mail replicas and maintain a rich user experience in use, you need to enable and configure some settings on the user's workstation. These settings can be found in the user Preferences and Location documentation for the users workstation, as shown in table 2.

Table 2. List of fields that need to be configured

Workstation settings	Value
Create Local Replicas	Mail file, Directory Catalog
User Preferences
Cascade Directory Catalog (mail\general tab)	Name of Catalog Catalog database
Check for new mail every (mail\general tab)	5 minutes
Automatically refresh Inbox (mail\general tab)	Enabled
Create full-text indexing for searching (Replication tab)	Enabled
Should Notes encrypt new replicas? (Replication tab)	Locally encrypt using Medium encryption
Location Document (Mail tab)
Mail File Location	Local
Recipient Name Type-ahead	Local only
Mail addressing	Local and Server
Transfer Outgoing Mail if	1
Location Document (Replication tab)
Enable Replication	Enabled
Create New Replicas	Immediately
Replicate when Notes starts	Enabled, Prompt before replicating
Schedule	Enabled
Replicate Daily between	7:00 am–7:00 PM
Repeat every	Minutes
Days of week	Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri
Replicate when Notes ends	Prompt to replicate as Notes shuts down, in anything are waiting to be sent.

There are two ways to configure these settings on a user station: manual or Use policy. This section configures the client manually by steps. The next section discusses how to use the Lotus Domino policy to set these parameters.