Admin2005, the sixth annual edition of The View Administration Conference for Lotus Software Professionals, will be held at the Sheraton Boston Hotel in the Prudential Center in Boston from May 18-20. The event is dedicated to helping Notes/Domino administrators optimize all aspects of their job: messaging, performance, security, user management, server and database administration, collaboration, and upcoming technologies.
What will make this, the sixth annual edition of the show, different from those of previous years? The administration of Lotus Notes and Domino "is a fairly mature market," says Debbie Lynd, director of conferences for Dedham, Mass.-based Wellesley Information Services, the show's organizer. "We're more focused on tips and techniques now, as opposed to features and functions. Instead of needing to know how to install something, now it's about tweaking and refining."
The show will be divided into eight tracks: Messaging Infrastructure Services; Client Configuration and Maintenance; Core Server Administration; Enterprise Directory Management; Platforms and Performance; Application Maintenance & Optimization; Web Administration & Extended Products; and What's New in Release 7. There will be more than 70 sessions, not including the show's keynote presentation, which will be given on Wednesday, May 18 at 8:30 a.m. by Ambuj Goyal, general manager of IBM Lotus Software. Goyal will further lay out the roadmap for Notes/Domino and IBM Workplace and will provide information on the benefits of Release 7, which has significant scalability and ease-of-administration improvements.
Lynd also expects the show's spotlight on the BlackBerry wireless connectivity device will also be of prime interest to attendees. "A lot of people who are upgrading to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server are requesting training for BlackBerry," she told SearchDomino.com. "Until now, the BlackBerry has been a vehicle for getting your e-mail when you're on the road. With the Enterprise Server version 4.0, [Research In Motion] wants to show how they've opened up the development platform. So at the show you'll see lots of third-party applications, and examples of how you can extend your existing applications to the BlackBerry model.
Accordingly, a Jumpstart training session on BlackBerry Enterprise Server v 4.0 Basics will be held on Tuesday, May 17, along with three others: Putting Policies to Work, Administration Essentials, and Development 101 for Administrators. "Administrators also dabble as developers," notes Lynd. But Domino has expanded over the years, and there is a greater gap between administrations and developers than there may once have been. "This training session is designed for administrators who don't know about development," says Lynd. "It's a three-hour session that will teach them the basics of development, such as creating agents, so they'll know where they can go from there."
The track entitled What's New in Release 7 features two hands-on labs: What's New in Administration for Domino Release 7 and NSFDB2 – What It Means to Administrators. The first lab will help admins evaluate the pros and cons of new message features such as private whitelists, blacklists and message disclaimers, and tap into the power of policies and learn how to lock them down to ensure compliance. The NSFDB2 lab will address the ramifications of how the option of storing Domino data in DB2 affects Domino and its requirements, security and data integration.
The remaining six sessions in track are:
- Upgrading to 7, which reveals potential problem areas as well as best practices for transitioning to the new release;
- Automatic Diagnostic Collection and Fault Analyzer, which will explain how to collect data from Domino server crashes and send them to support;
- Exploring the Benefits of Notes/Domino 7, which will reveal data that isn't available in the release notes;
- Notes Release 7 Calendar Arrives, which will explain the new features in this Notes component and help you handle coexistence with previous versions;
- Domino 7 Domain Monitoring, which will discuss the new feature which can detect, analyze and resolve Domino problems across an enterprise;
- Introduction to DB2 for the Domino Administrator, which is geared to increasing the comfort level of admins new to DB2 and its possible use as a backend datastore for Domino; and
- New Features for Domino Web Access in Release 7, which will help administrators resolve offline issues experienced by Domino Web Access users.
The show will also give attendees the opportunity to sit down with many of the conference speakers at the end of the day and ask them questions face to face; Birds of a Feather sessions, a networking opportunity that will give attendees the chance to network with experts and their peers in lab settings; Certification Testing and Prep Labs; and Solution Spotlight sessions headed by Notes/Domino technical solution providers.
To obtain more information on Admin2005, click here.
