Teamstudio Locks Down Notes-Domino Systems

Corrected: January 31, 2006

by Alex Woodie

One of the things separating the Lotus Notes and Domino platform from other platforms is a sense of developer entitlement. Until recently every Notes user was also considered a developer, with full clearance to make alterations. While this enabled people to rapidly create new applications, it was also the source of headaches from an administrative and security point of view. With last week's delivery of Policy Manager, Teamstudio has given administrators a new way to put production Notes/Domino systems in administrative lock down.

The Lotus Notes/Domino platform has a bit of a reputation for being difficult to manage, says Nigel Cheshire, the CEO of Teamstudio, a provider of tools and services for Notes/Domino. "Before R4 in 1997 or 1998, every user was still a developer. And anybody involved with Lotus Notes for more than a few years has experienced this problem of applications springing up all over the place."

While an administrator wouldn't have much trouble implementing good security on a single Notes/Domino application by properly configuring its Access Control List (ACL), the aforementioned application proliferation problem makes that troublesome in enterprise environments. Perhaps it's a case of there being too much of a good thing.

"Notes/Domino has a good and robust security module. The only difficulty with it is it's very granular," Cheshire says. "You can set all kinds of access rights for individual people for individual access rights on individual servers. But because it's so granular, and because Notes/Domino shops often have thousands of databases and hundreds of servers, people tend to not do it [use the security module] at all."

Of course, doing nothing security-wise is not a good idea in this age of increased regulatory oversight, especially when it comes to the critical applications (e-mail notwithstanding) that many large enterprises run on the Notes/Domino platform. With Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, et al., making their impact felt on IT departments around the country, doing nothing for Notes/Domino is not a good thing.

Teamstudio's answer to the peddlers of do-nothingness is Policy Manager. With Teamstudio Policy Manager, administrators now have a tool for automatically configuring ACL policies across large numbers of databases and users, and for automatically enforcing those policies against said databases and users. When somebody gets around the policies or otherwise violates their content, Policy Manager automatically sends the administrator an e-mail describing the encroachment. It also offers detailed reporting capabilities.

Teamstudio developed Policy Manager in response to problems customers were having with production environments. "Most of people come to us for problems with their development environment," Cheshire says, referring to source code control and change management tools for Notes/Domino. "But there's no point in getting the development environment locked down, if once you get out into production, people start monkeying around. Just looking at development environment is a waste of time if you don't lock down the production environment at the same time."

Policy Manager is available now, and costs $5,000 per server.

In addition to Policy Manager, Teamstudio also announced a new release of its Migration Filters for helping users upgrade to the latest releases of Notes/Domino. With this release, Teamstudio added support for Notes/Domino Release 7, which has only been out for several months. Most of Teamstudio's customers are on Release 6, Cheshire says.

Teamstudio made its product announcements last week from IBM's Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Florida. Chesire reported a growing sense of optimism among the faithful. "Everybody's getting a sense of the ongoing longevity of the Notes platform. That's what people have been worried about for the last couple years or so," he says. "I think people were worried they had to rip out infrastructure and replace Notes with Java."

Instead of pushing WebSphere, IBM has been positioning Notes/Domino as a member of the Workplace family, "and a very important member that's not going to go away," Cheshire says. "Workplace is an environment where you build composite applications, and Notes can be a part of those composite applications. It's a very important piece, and it continues to have a life."

This article has been corrected. Nigel Cheshire's name was misspelled. IT Jungle regrets the error.