The whirlwind known as Admin2009 is now over, yet the communication channel from the event never seems to close. Between the normal outcropping of follow-up questions and other questions that were not quite ready to be asked during Admin, the river has opened. What I find interesting is how I am receiving the communication flow. Sure, there is plenty of email that regularly trickles in and provides much of the content for the monthly newsletters. But I also joyfully accept the amount of people sending Twitter messages, putting up community postings, and using other social-networking tools.

For the third time, we held a social-networking birds-of-a-feather (BOF) session at Admin2009 to a group that gave up part of their lunch to watch, learn, and participate by asking some great questions. Many were skeptics on how they could not only find the time, but incorporate social networks and media into their daily routines to be more productive. I know by the end, more than a handful were sold because I suddenly had them as new followers and friends across numerous networks.

So I ask you, my faithful and new readers alike, how do you want to communicate with not only me, but everyone else in the yellow bubble and beyond? Do you think email is the best mechanism? Is instant messaging more gratifying and does it feel close to a face-to-face meeting? Does your information need to be shared with a larger audience, so you want to place it in a central community and point people to it? Do you want to blindly broadcast it and see who finds it and responds? What mechanisms do you use now and what will you use in a few weeks or months?

I am trying to steer you towards thinking far outside your normal means of communication to reach a greater audience. Most of the time, someone else has already faced the very issue you're having problems with. That is why I put emails into this newsletter. One simple email sent directly to me then reaches thousands right away and more as it sits on the public Web site. Ponder that while you read all about Sametime this month from beginning to end. First up is dealing with an incredible architecture that has one remaining loophole — instant meetings. From there, I look at cleaning up your Sametime Meeting Center, issues with versions on Sametime Advanced plugging into Sametime Connect, and lastly some architecture talk around multiple companies and the Enterprise Meeting Server (EMS).

You can always reach me in my VGS (Virtual Gratification Syndrome) world via Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Diigo, Tumblr, GTalk, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, Sametime, Greenhouse, Paxos, BleedYellow, smoke signal, carrier pigeon, my podcasts, or my blog for your questions, comments, and ideas. Notice that voicemail isn't on that list? If those are not enough, I can name another 200 ways.

— Chris Miller
Sys Admin Tips Newsletter
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IdoNotes@IdoNotes.com
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QUESTION: Chris,

I am sorry that I didn't get a chance to corner you at Admin2009 this year, but I am trying to do something with Sametime that I think can be done logically. However, IBM is saying it can't. So I just had to ask the expert and see if you have ever tried it.

We have a pretty advanced Sametime architecture. We have six clustered chat servers running on VM that are centrally located in our main data centers (two NA, two Asia, two EMEA), as well as dedicated meeting servers that are dispersed regionally for better meeting presentation. We have the chat clusters sitting behind a content switch, so the content switch can make the determination as to which server is closest to the user with the best availability. No EMS.

The problem is that everywhere outside of the US, the users love their instant meetings. I have attended enough of Paul Mooney's presentations to have picked up a few new ideas for "retraining" the end users. But the fact remains that they are lazy and they use them all the time. And in Sametime world, we all know that instant meetings happen on the chat servers, which may not even be located on the same continent as the users. Add VM to the mix and we are looking at an all around bad user experience.

So wouldn't it be nice if we could redirect our instant meetings to our designated meeting servers? Now I know that scheduled meetings occur in stconf.nsf and instant meetings occur on stsrc.nsf. IBM is completely okay with doing a Web redirect on stconf.nsf. But for some reason when you read their technotes (1199602 and 1110191) on the subject of redirecting the instant meetings, all they say is that meetings failed to load properly when you redirect all http services on the server. But when I put in a Web redirect on the stsrc.nsf in our sandbox, everything appears to be working correctly. My friends at IBM reminded me that in the IBM world, unused services will always be shut off and thus the reason it probably didn't work in their environment. But in our happy little world, we installed all of our servers the same way and just use other tools to keep the meetings and chats where they belong.

Thoughts? Have you tried it? Am I just completely insane? Do I just need to get out the big stick and retrain the users the painful way? Anything you can share with me would be greatly appreciated. I'm under a lot of pressure to get this meeting thing "fixed."

Thanks for any help in advance!
Darlyne

ANSWER: Darlyne,

Let me deal with the first part of your architecture. You are running three sets of two servers in a large six-server cluster. That portion makes perfect sense. You then use the content switch to move people based on geography to a specific two-server set. Here is where I start having questions. Are the users just sent to the server set for the original connection or are they forced to stay on those servers once connected? I ask because due to load and balancing, the user could be shifted to another server. Also, what home server is placed in their person document (or LDAP record)? I presume it is also the cluster name and that vpuserinfo.nsf is appropriately clustered.

Now those questions bring me to instant meetings. If the user is being forced to a particular server and then forced to stay there, the instant meeting must be there also. Why would it be on servers all over the world? If a user in NA is chatting with a user in Asia and initiates an instant meeting, the Asia user would have to come across to the NA server in any case.

So you wish to take the next step and just redirect requests to the meeting database on the chat servers to the designated meeting servers. I have read those technotes many times before and know where you are headed. In theory, this should work because you want no meetings to occur on your chat servers and use HTTP redirects to force any requests to go elsewhere. However, I am not sure if there is something hardcoded into the instant-meeting portion of the Sametime clients that wouldn't respond well to the redirection of the users' connected chat server. I am looking into that for you now.

I would test every possible scenario you can, understanding that you might have to back this part of the architecture out and leave instant meetings alone if we discover that they hardcode or worse, there's a bug.

Chris

Throwing Out the Junk: What Companies Need to Know to Manage Huge Volumes of Data

Fact #1: Businesses send 87 billion e-mails a day, 3,500 petabytes of e-mail per year, and that volume is growing by 50% annually.

Fact #2: According to a recent survey from Robert Half Legal staffing agency, electronic discovery will have the most effect on the practice of law over the next five years.

What's the connection? A changing litigation environment and the 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have forever changed the e-discovery environment and the way in which organizations (and their lawyers as well as folks like you who manage the Notes messaging environment) need to think about the management, preservation and destruction of Electronically Stored Information (ESI), including e-mail.

If you're surprised to hear me introduce the term "destruction", you're not alone. All organizations need a way to counteract the "data-landfill" effect — the seemingly unstoppable growth in the volume of ESI. Corporate packrats have long promoted the "just-in-case" approach to data preservation — don't destroy anything (e-mail, backup tapes, file systems, NSFs) just in case the data is required for knowledge, audit or litigation reasons. With large corporations facing an average of 150 active lawsuits, that might seem valid. But what of the cost and risk of retaining records that are no longer required for business or litigation purposes?

Forward thinking organizations are implementing technology and policies to manage data preservation for legal holds and to enforce policy-based data retention.

A growing number of organizations, particularly those who have a Lotus Notes messaging environment, are implementing AXS-One's award winning AXS-Link for Lotus Notes e-mail archiving solution to help them implement appropriate technology and processes needed for effective data retention and, in parallel, secure destruction.

The AXS-One solution includes a complete records retention, deletion and management component, integral to the archive server. This is a workflow-based system for managing all electronic assets (i.e., e-mail) registered within the archive server. All registered objects are associated with your retention policy, by the assignment of a category, which incorporates both a records-management and storage-management file plan. The retention policies are executed to ensure that objects are managed through their life cycle, which includes any and all legal holds (in the event of litigation) as well as securely destroying the objects. The product allows for the automatic destruction of expired records and/or workflows to perform user reviews of expired or about to expire archived messages. These flexible, business-process oriented workflows can be utilized to review all, specific, or randomly generated records by either the business or system-administrator users. The product provides the added benefit of an auditable chain of custody to ensure that all interactions with documents are fully captured for audit and control.

The product includes an integrated chain of custody manifest for each managed object, which maintains an auditable chain of custody of all processes executed against each object. The system comes preconfigured with example retention policies that can be further customized to meet customer requirements.

AXS-One requires less hardware and storage footprint than alternative solutions. Part of the reason is due to the solution not requiring a relational database. In addition, AXS-One employs true Single Instance Storage (SIS) at the enterprise level. This is in contrast to some other solutions which, although claiming to institute SIS, often include replications across different users and groups increasing storage requirements significantly. Finally, AXS-One employs the industry's highest compression rate.

• All e-mail is automatically, correctly and consistently classified as it is archived.
• E-mail is only retained for as long as is required to support business, regulatory and/or legal needs.
• Changes to standard data retention, such as legal hold, can also be automatically managed.
• All retention is fully audited and a complete chain of custody is retained for every e-mail message.
• E-mail can be safely destroyed when it has reached the end of its life cycle, putting an end to the "just-in-case" approach of mail retention.
• Use of backups can be limited to support backup/disaster recovery needs, versus an ad-hoc approach to data retention.

A common issue I find when working with customers in both hosted and managed environments, as well as while upgrading Sametime servers, is the size and performance of the Sametime Meeting Center (stconf.nsf). This database performs incredibly well when you keep track of the database size. It has a set limit of 1GB, by default, when you install Sametime. The best performance comes, from my experience, when you keep the size well below 600MB. Lotus says 800MB in their documents on this topic.

In most cases, people have been uploading and attaching meeting files to this database for years and never pay attention to its growth. Slowly the meeting service performance degrades, and companies usually complain it is the number of meetings being held or that Sametime is a bad product. A quick fix and health check is to make sure that you have been purging old meeting documents and attachments and compacting the database to recover space.

Now you might need some server outage time to compact the stconf.nsf database, but you may run the purge agent while the server is up. The agent acts upon meeting documents that have reached a specific age requirement. I suggest running the agent at least every month to keep a good schedule on the meeting services for servers that have normal meeting usage. For servers with heavy usage, consider running it every two weeks or so.

Caution: This will remove documents. If you have retention requirements or for some reason need old meeting data, you might want to consider modifying the agent to meet your needs. Otherwise, the defaults will remove everything that's a certain date and older.

DON'T MISS OUR JUNE USER GROUP MEETING

Extend the Value of IBM Lotus Applications with Unified Communications

Date: Tuesday, June 16, 2009; 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -5)
Presenter: Allan Mendelsohn, Senior Product Manager, Avaya
Follow-up Online Discussion Forum: The week of June 15, 2009

A successful Unified Communications implementation automates and unifies all forms of communications into a common user experience, increases efficiency, and can result in an optimization of business processes and enhanced human communications. Join us for this online presentation by Unified Communications expert Allan Mendelsohn, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Avaya, and see how Unified Communications solutions are helping businesses and institutions utilize improved communications and collaboration to increase performance and become more responsive to customers. Get a firsthand look at how you can extend telephony presence and click-to-call into Lotus Sametime, Notes, Quickr, and Connections. Discover how to integrate unified messaging into Lotus Notes and Domino, and how Avaya can help you unify audio conferencing with Sametime instant messaging and Web conferencing. Plus, see how the combined solution can embed communications into a workflow, enhance the ability to collaborate, empower greater levels of productivity, and reduce latency in business processes.

The presentation will be followed by an online discussion forum where you can ask questions, provide feedback, and network with your peers.

Viewing the online presentation and participating in the forum is free but requires preregistration. Register today!

EXCLUSIVE NEW BENEFIT

A license to THE VIEW Online Knowledgebase allows access to every article ever published by THE VIEW, a new article every week, and a printed update of recently posted articles sent 10 times per year. But never before has THE VIEW made single articles available to anyone for purchase. Starting this week, LotusUserGroup.org members will have exclusive access to purchase single articles from THE VIEW, starting with two fantastic article compilations, each providing 2 articles for the price of 1.

Only LotusUserGroup.org members have access to purchase these articles, previously published in THE VIEW, without a subscription to THE VIEW Online Knowledgebase.

Find out more about the articles and how you can get a copy here.

ACHIEVE YOUR COLLABORATION OBJECTIVES WHILE MANAGING EXPENSES

Don't miss this recorded online presentation by Yaacov Cohen, President and CEO, Mainsoft, and Jonas Martinsson, Product Manager, Mainsoft. The presentation is designed to help IBM customers who have adopted (or are looking to adopt) Microsoft SharePoint, the opportunity to succeed in today's challenging economy by illuminating a more cost-efficient path to an effective collaboration environment.

In the presentation, you'll see a plan for strategic coexistence that costs 1/10th the cost of a typical migration strategy. Mainsoft CEO, Cohen presents common-use cases for integrating SharePoint and Lotus Notes, including remote document authoring and archiving Lotus Notes emails on SharePoint.

You'll see some great demos too. Martinsson demos Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes software, which enables users to access, modify, and publish Lotus Notes emails and attachments on SharePoint from a Lotus Notes sidebar and previews support for Lotus Notes 8.5, including the integration of SharePoint events in the Lotus Notes calendar and business mashups that integrate data and business logic from Lotus Notes, Domino, Java, and SharePoint.

The presentation is free for LotusUserGroup.org members. View it today!

SAMETIME UNIFIED TELEPHONY OVERVIEW

May 21, 2009 at 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -5)

Don't miss our next Lotusphere Comes to You ONLINE session, "Sametime Unified Telephony Overview," presented by David Marshak and Tracee Wolf of IBM Lotus. This session will provide an overview of Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony, a new offering that enhances the voice capabilities in the basic Lotus Sametime product — adding softphone capabilities, aggregated awareness, incoming call control (with options to join or route the call in easy and flexible ways), call history, and simple user-authored rules for handling calls in specific situations. You'll come away with a better understanding of these capabilities and how they would apply to your environments.

It is free to view the session, but requires preregistration. Register today!

If you happen to be running Sametime Connect client version 8.0.2 and also have Sametime Advanced, you will find that the update site from the Sametime Advanced server will produce errors in the Sametime Connect 8.0.2 client. They basically do not play nicely with each other.

To solve this, you should download the Sametime Advanced 8.0.1 CF1 fix. This is only to be used for Sametime Connect 8.0.2 clients. Attempting to install this with Sametime Connect 8.0 or 8.0.1 clients will also produce errors.

You can download the CF1 update now.

QUESTION: Hi Chris,

I attended your "Administering Lotus Sametime" session at Admin2009 but didn't have the detail I needed to ask a question then.

We are setting up a single Sametime EMS with anticipation to share communities between our sister companies. They currently share communities between them, but in doing so, opened their firewalls to allow individual Sametime Java Connect clients access into each other's communities (Notes/Domino 7.0.3 using Sametime 7.5.1).

1. Our security team is not as anxious to allow a client from outside our LAN direct connection using a shared WAN to our Sametime EMS. Is there a way to route the connections from their Sametime EMS to our Sametime EMS (i.e., server-to-server connections without the use of the Sametime Gateway)?
2. From what we've seen between the sister companies, if Java Connect User1 from company ABC has company XYZ's EMS listed as a community, he or she is able to share presence awareness with anyone at company XYZ's Lotus Notes client. But because company XYZ does not widely use the Java Connect client, company XYZ's users don't see any presence awareness with company ABC.

Could you give us any suggestions on how to resolve/work around these or point me to some information?

Thanks,
Carol

ANSWER: Carol,

EMS itself does not handle chat (community) connections, only meetings (see technote 7009826 for a diagram). The load for where a client connects is handled by the load-balancer solution you chose to point users to the chat server/cluster with. So EMSs act in tandem as one giant EMS cluster or independently with no awareness of other EMSs.

Having said all that, you have some choices. The Sametime Gateway offers the best security and growth opportunity. But, this will require a Sametime Gateway at both companies that then connect together to share presence and awareness. Meeting services are not covered by this.

There is one more choice to open and foster better communication. You could cross certify the Sametime servers at each company together to securely share presence. This would require a firewall rule, but it would be secured. This would then allow presence for both the Sametime Connect client and the Java Connect client.

In both scenarios, the client connects to their own local Sametime Community and then presence is passed between communities. EMS is then used for load balancing meeting services.

Chris

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