Planning Ahead to Connect the Dots Between IBM Domino, Notes, Connections and the Cloud

Planning Ahead to
Connect the Dots
Between IBM Domino,
Notes, Connections
and the Cloud
Francie Tanner
panagenda

© 2013 Wellesley Information Services. All rights reserved.

What We’ll Cover …
• Introduction
• Infrastructure/IBM Connections
• Regulation/Security
• Cloud/Preparing your Migration
• Wrap-up

2

Introduction

• Francie Tanner, Technical Director, Americas
 Over 15 years experience in IBM Notes and
Domino consulting
 Managing, architecting, and supporting
10-100,000 user environments
 Experienced instructor and speaker

 Is from Switzerland, lives in the Caribbean

3

Introduction (cont.)
• Regardless if you’re thinking about going to the cloud,
Connections, consolidating, or growing your environment:
 Crucial data lives in various places in your IT infrastructure

 Doing any of the above projects requires you to look at this
data in a “big picture” view

• The challenge: How do you connect the various information silos?
 Knowledge is spread out in the environment in numerous
repositories on several servers
 In many situations, companies aren’t even aware of the
information available to them

4

Introduction (cont.)
• Scope and theme of this session
 There is no such thing as a “one size fits all” solution to this
problem
 But we can show you where and how to look to make sense of
your connected environment
 You don’t necessarily need a third-party product or vendor to
help you
 If you haven’t noticed by now, this isn’t a technical integration
session
 Three customer scenarios are covered where we’ve helped
cope with these types of issues

5

• Introduction
• Wrap-up

6

Infrastructure/IBM Connections
• Leveraging the full potential of IBM Connections can have a
significant impact on your IT environment
 Connecting end-user knowledge to projects and communities

 Providing wikis or Knowledge Bases

 File repositories to store data outside of email

 Discussion boards, forums, blogs

• Your reason to deploy Connections depends on your IT strategy
 What you want to measure/know more about, hence, depends
on that, too

7

Infrastructure/IBM Connections (cont.)
• Important not only in this example: Know your baseline!
 What amount of _____ (fill in the blank focus area) are you
doing today?

• Server metrics and statistics help you gain transparency

8

• How do you plan a Connections implementation and introduce it
to employees?
 Who gets access?

 Who is my pilot group?

 Which mail servers/regions/organization levels?

 How do you communicate your goal to employees?

 Do organizational policies have to be created by management?

 Files larger than __ have to live in Connections

 All communication around a certain project lives in
Connections

9

• Customer example: “What effects will Connections have on my
Domino mailing infrastructure?”
 Primary goal: Reducing the Domino mail volume

 Primary goal: Reducing the number of large attachments in
Domino databases
 Secondary goal: Gain better server performance with less
traffic, which in turn leads to server consolidation potential

10

• Customer example: Messaging baseline and impact
 Domino Statistics (gathered via STATREP.NSF)
 Mail.TotalRouted (Mail.Delivered/Mail.Transferred)
 Mail.DeliveredSize.* (Mail.TransferredSize.*)

 File  Export  Comma Separated Value
 Combine results of multiple servers in spreadsheet calculation
software
• See Andy Pedisich’s blog at www.andypedisich.com on how to
process cumulative statistics in spreadsheet calculation
programs 11

• Customer example: IBM Connections metrics
 Connections Files Servermetrics (gathered via Web browser)

 URL: https://your.connections.server/files/app#/statistics

 File sharing details/user activity

12

• Summary: What information do we understand better now?
 Our Domino mail volume in general and attachment size
distribution
 Information on how many users use the Files application

 Data on the files being attached

 Over time, effectiveness of the Connections implementation

• Connecting the above dots tells you if and how the goals are
being achieved
 Continuous analysis is needed here

13

• Bonus tip: other Connections server metrics exist
 Only basic information is provided, IBM Cognos is not required

 Activity Stats:
https://your.connections.server/activities/service/html/serverme
trics
 Community Stats:
https://your.connections.server/communities/service/html/serve
rmetrics

14

• Introduction
• Wrap-up

15

Regulation/Security
• Fact: The way we collaborate is constantly evolving
 New collaboration solutions come and go

 Chat and VOIP solutions are adopted and decommissioned

 Remember the 360 degree turn of ICQ?

 Mobile device access is relatively new and “addictive”

 This means constantly evolving security, standardization,
and integration challenges
 Company mergers and migrations sometimes force change

 Labor laws and regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC, and
HIPAA, apply
 Think electronic information retention

16

Regulation/Security (cont.)
• Let’s look at one of these unusual and interesting examples
now ...

• Customer Example: Volkswagen decided to turn off BlackBerry
email forwarding outside working hours

• Customer Example: Atos announced an intended ban of internal
emails in 2014

• Social responsibility pressure is building, particularly among
large European companies because of the above

17

• Former “nice to have“ technical information suddenly has
management attention
 Such as mail volume forwarded to BlackBerry devices during
non-business hours
 Such as total amount of email processed per month

 Such as alternative collaboration methods to be implemented
and measured

18

• Basic questions:
 How many emails are sent through our messaging
environment?
 How many of those are sent to or from mobile devices?

• Knowledge Repositories
 Domino Statistics (gathered via STATREP
.NSF as before)
 Mail.Delivered

 Mail.Transferred

19

• Knowledge Repositories
 Traveler Statistics (gathered via STATREP.NSF as before)

 Traveler.DeviceSync.Documents.ToDevice.Mail.Add

 Traveler.DeviceSync.Documents.ToServer.Mail.Add

 BES Statistics (gathered via SNMP browser)

 blackBerryServer.besTotMsgsSent.0 ( SNMP OID:
1.3.6.1.4.1.3530.5.3.0 )
 blackBerryServer.besTotMsgsRecvd.0 ( SNMP OID:
1.3.6.1.4.1.3530.5.4.0 )

20

• Advanced questions:
 Group information per weekday, rather than on a simple time
axis
 Group information per work shift within a weekday

21

• Information Ninja-level questions:
 Break down the information to identify region, location, and
department volume
 Connecting messaging information with HR data helps

22

• Customer gained transparency on:
 What the actual collaboration usage patterns are
 What measures are reasonable to enforce in their situation

• Customer approach as a result:
 Organizational policy that discourages outside work hour
mobile device email activity
 Continuously checking mail volume to verify policy compliance

• Options down the line:
 Analysis broken down to locations and departments enables
pin-point measures
 If continuous compliance measurements aren’t satisfactory,
service restrictions may need to be implemented
23

• Introduction
• Wrap-up

24

Cloud/Preparing Your Migration
• Core question in every migration – what do you have to migrate?
 We’re assuming you’ve answered the “why” at this point

• Migration destinations: XPages, Notes Web Plugin, LotusLive,
Traveler, something else, etc.

• Knowing your environment is a basic requirement
 Database activity and resource usage

 User behavior and activity patterns

• The data you need is already in your LOG.NSF (and
CATALOG.NSF), we simply need to turn it into useful information

25

Cloud/Preparing Your Migration (cont.)
• DB Activity: LOG.NSF – documents with form type “Activity”

 Answers baseline questions around what is used, not used,
size
 View selection formula: SELECT FORM = "Activity"
 Add columns that are interesting in your scenario

26

• DB Activity: LOG.NSF – database activity details

 Note there is a 1,400 activity entry maximum per database
(FIFO)
 There is also a 64K size limit for the user activity
 More details in IBM Technote #1086245

27

• DB Activity: CATALOG.NSF
 Related information, but different focus

 Full text index details

 Replication information

 ACL overview

 Note: maintenance tasks ...

28

• When is user activity a topic?
 Can be important when consolidation is a part of the migration

 DB activity summaries are limited by technical restrictions, raw
user data not so much
 When differentiating between server and user activity

• Why are usage patterns important?
 Learning how users use Notes or other software

 Such as before migrating to XPages, Notes browser plugin

 Identifying “abnormal” access

 Terminated users still accessing systems, huge amounts of
data transfer, etc.

29

• How can we extract that kind of data?
 Simple user activity via view in your log.nsf, export to CSV

 Session activity/usage patterns via script or third-party tools

30

• User Activity: LOG.NSF – basic information is easy to extract

 File  Export  Comma Separated Value
 Combine results of multiple servers in spreadsheet calculation
software

31

• Summary: What kind of questions can we now answer?
 Which databases are used/unused?

 What kind of traffic do we see on different servers?

 What is the proportion between storage requirement and
activity?
 Which users generate which amount of server traffic?

 Where are the users geographically in relation to the
information?

32

• All this can tell you ... and more
 How much space is needed in the new cloud solution

 Which databases or servers can be decommissioned

 Which databases should move closer to users

 How much traffic is expected in the new cloud solution

33

• Introduction
• Wrap-up

34

7 Key Points to Take Home
1. Useful information lives everywhere, existing and custom views in
IBM Domino, Connections, Traveler, and other logs, catalogs

2. Exporting data and making it user friendly goes a long way
 You may already have the answers to questions, but don’t know
where to look

1. Combining different data sources in spreadsheet format paints a
connected “big picture”

2. Be sure to check out those Connections and Traveler URLs

35

7 Key Points to Take Home (cont.)
5. You can’t truly migrate, expand, consolidate without knowing your
baseline

6. Even though we don’t go into day-to-day monitoring and statistics
in here, it’s crucial; learn more about this

7. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for everyone, as each project
is different

36

Your Turn!

How to contact me:
Francie Tanner
Francie.tanner@panagenda.com
37

Planning Ahead to Connect the Dots Between IBM Domino, Notes, Connections and the Cloud

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