Domino Policies FAQ

One of the most powerful tool for the admin in Domino are policies.  Policies in Domino are not only very powerful, but also sometimes difficult to understand and hard to implement. So many admins think that policies in Domino are buggy, because the do not understand how policies work in Domino.

Fortunately IBM has held an "Ask the Experts Q&A" session this month which answers all questions about the following topics.

• Dynamic Client Configuration & Timing
• Mail & Custom policies
• Groups
• Passwords
• General Administration

The FAQ's in this "Ask the Experts Q&A" are a must read for every Domino Admin.

Have a look at my other postings relating policies

Force the Notes client to refresh policies from the server

One of the best Admin features of the Domino Notes eco system are the Policies. With Domino policies you can control many aspects of the configuration of your notes clients in your environment. You can prevent your users from accidentally change configuration settings to values which will not work in your environment, or you can enforce security settings in the client to match your security policies in your company. So Domino Policies are really very important part of a successful Notes client deployment. If you need information what you can do and how to implement policies properly you can find many good advice in the "Using IBM Lotus Domino 8.5 Policies to Manage Your Clients" from Darren Duke.

But one major annoyance of the implementation of Domino policies is that it is very unpredictable when the notes client will refresh his policies from the server. Especially in test environments you restart your clients often only to see that your changes on Policies are still not pushed to your test client. Or something in your client goes wrong and policies will not be updated anymore. So i have created a small lotus script program to delete the local cache of the policies and refresh all policies from the server which you can put in the click event of a button.

Sub Click(Source As Button)
 Dim s As New NotesSession
 Call s.SetEnvironmentVar("PoliciesLocalViewModTime","",True)
 Forall db In s.AddressBooks
  Call db.open("", "") ' Must open database
  'Refresh Policies View on Server  
  If db.IsPublicAddressBook Then
   Set view=db.getView("($Policies)")
   view.refresh
   Set view=db.getView("($PoliciesExt)")
   If Not view Is Nothing Then
     view.refresh
   End If
  End If
  'Remove all policydocuments on the local client  
  If db.isPrivateAddressBook And db.server="" Then
   Set view=db.getView("($Policies)")
   Set doc=view.getFirstDocument
   view.autoupdate=False
   While Not doc Is Nothing
    Set tempdoc=doc    
    Set doc=view.getNextDocument(doc)
    tempdoc.remove(True)
   Wend
   view.autoupdate=True
   view.refresh
  End If
 End Forall
 'Run Dynamic client configuration to repopulate the local policy view 
 Set s=Nothing 
 result=Shell ("ndyncfg.exe ""1""",1)
End Sub

I have tried this code in our Domino 8.5.3 environment. If you have any problems please leave a comment.

Have a look at my other postings relating policies