CrashTestChix

Happy New Year everyone!  I hope that you’re going to to be attending Lotusphere in a few weeks!

In July 2009, I posted an article titled:  “These Boots are made for…Admin Boot Camp.”  It suggested a track targeting administators at Lotusphere 2010.  Well, as it turns out, people really do read this stuff, including Kristin Keene (Lotusphere Goddess) and Bob Balaban.   They approached several individuals about including their sessions to be featured in a new program at Lotusphere this year – ADMIN BOOT CAMP!!!

Ok admit it administrators.  You have created custom views in the Domino Directory.  I've done it myself.  I have several that I use on a daily basis.  For example, a view of users sorted by certifier or one that lists users by group membership.  Some of these views may be "public" in that they were designed to streamline some directory data for your users. But I suspect that many of them were designed primarily for administrative purposes only. 

So think about that.  Do you really need those specialized views to be available to your users?  And what about the default Server config views, do you really want all your users to have access to that information?  No.  Do you want pesky developers second guessing why you have restricted their access to server agents?  No!  So do yourself a favor, HIDE THE VIEWS.  You have the ability to hide them based on reader roles that are already in the default ACL of the Domino Directory or you can add specific ones.  You can also take advantage of design properties that hide views from either the view menu, folders pane, or from web access.

For those Custom views you've created for your own administrative needs,  I'd recommend restricting access based on a reader list. You may want to add a special administrator's role or group to your Domino Directory that you can use for this purpose.  To accomplish this:

1. In Domino Designer
2. Open the view, and select View Properties
3. Click the Security Tab
4. Deselect "All Readers and above."
5. Cick each user, group, server or access role you want to include. A check mark will appear next to the name or group.
6. Save the view or folder.

You can also use this method for hiding Server configuration views, so be sure to include the LocalDomainServers and LocalDomainAdmins group in those included as readers.  Do this in your test environment first to make sure that you are not restricting access to a view that has been customized for a particular third party application or user.

Another method for restricting view access is to omit the view from either the view menu, folder pan, or from web clients.

1. In the View Properties box - deselect "Show in View" menu on the options tab.  (this only applies to Notes users).
2. To hide the view from the Views - Go to View selection option, give the view a name and enclose it in parentheses.
3. To hide the view from web clients, click the view name in the Design toolbox righ pane, and choose Design - Design Properties. Select "Hide design element from Web clients." Give the view a name and enclose it in parentheses.  This will prevent the view from being available from the Go to View selection in the client as well.

I also would recommend keeping a separate database as your "warehouse" for your Domino Directory customized views.  If you only use them occasionally, why keep them in the Domino Directory all the time?  Create a separate database to store the view design elements and drop them in the Domino Directory only when you need to use them.  Thus saving some cpu, updall and full text indexing overhead on your server. 

And once again - test, test, test and test again before implementing in your production environment!