Teamstudio recently had a contest where they wanted you to showcase your applications so that others can see what folks are doing out there and so you could toot your own horn a bit.
My entry was probably a lot less snazzy than the ultimate winners (I haven’t seen them) as I tend to focus on non-public facing utilities and infrastructure improvements in my development work.
But I thought it would be worthwhile posting my entry here (now that they’ve let me know I *didn’t* win… *sniff*) so those of you who know me might get some idea what I spend part of my days doing.
I just call my application the “Admin Agent Repository”. It was originally created to house a single major utility and to serve as a common repository for the myriad agents that are useful for administrators on a day-to-day basis. But I have refined it to allow non-developer administrators access to its functionality.
The most visible application was to buffer us from the rather absolute and immediate nature of Domino’s user termination where the need to reinstate caused a lot of headaches.
A document is created for each terminated employee – this can be created by anybody granted the correct role so security or helpdesk folks can input terms directly – and, on the appointed date the user’s name is submitted to the deny access group.
The app also verifies whether or not the user has a Blackberry device and notifies our Blackberry group to remove their account.
Designed when background agents could not access databases on other servers, the application will then run an agent on the user’s home server and, if necessary, update their database ACL with the name of a person responsible for cleaning up the mail file and send a note, with a link to that responsible individual explaining their responsibilities.
When the purge date arrives (the default is 4 days, 30 if a responsible person is defined, all controlled via profile), the actual signed adminp request is submitted and the process proceeds as per Domino normal.
Reinstate is often as simple as putting the termination document on hold and removing the user from the deny group. No ACL updates, no repopulating in groups.
The repository is replete with utilities that I have found useful over the years, most are profile driven:
For instance the below profile drives our dynamically created groups. Each morning a subset of our groups are destroyed and recreated based on person document information input by either the users or our identity management system. The groups are used both to control application access based on certain criteria (i.e. all reports to a person can have access to a calendar app used by that team) or for communications (i.e. message to be sent to all folks within a particular state or management structure).
This one inspects all mail files and ensures that they not only have a template, but that it’s one of the standard ones that we mandate:
One ad-hoc utility that is quite popular is one that runs, inspects all of the calendar documents in a mail file and ensures that the $Busyname matches the Owner name from the calendar profile. Very handy for botched renames and transfers of mail files from other domains.
I also have a couple of “Rebuild Busytime” agents for clustered and non-clustered servers that run weekly to keep things there tip-top as well.
These utilities save us literally hours each week, any job that’s wasting my time I invest the effort into automating it and add it to this growing application.
