How are policies implemented?

Once you have identified these settings, your second task is figuring out how to apply the settings to the user community. You need to determine which users or groups of users should be assigned a particular policy, which subsequently contains a number of configuration settings known as settings documents.

Settings documents might sound complicated: Although settings documents might sound complicated, implementing them is actually much simpler than it sounds on paper. Once you've become familiar with the configuration settings, you merely need to determine the settings for a particular group of users and assign the policy.

Applications and planning: As with most projects or tasks, the key to successful implementation will be thorough understanding of the application and planning. Having a clear understanding of your user community and a well-defined implementation plan is a crucial step in the planning process and for creating a policy-based architecture. So, let's take a closer look at the approach. Key implementation tasks should include:

• Review the configuration settings and determine the comprehensive list of settings to be applied.
• Determine all users and groups of users within your community.
• Organize the configuration settings. In this step you need to identify the configuration rules to be applied to general registered users and those to be applied to each group of users.
• Create a policy document for general users and for each group of users as identified in the previous step.

Now that you understand the general approach to implementing policies, let's take a look at each type of settings documents that you can create and associate with a policy. Be aware that a policy might contain one or more settings documents. In short, the settings documents associated with a policy will depend on the user group to which they will be applied.

Survival Guide for Lotus Notes and Domino Administrators

 Part 1: What are policies?
 Part 2: How are policies implemented?
 Part 3: What are settings documents?
 Part 4: What is a policy architecture?
 Part 5: Creating settings and policy documents
 Part 6: Creating policy documents
 Part 7: Registering a new user using an explicit policy
 Part 8: Assigning an explicit policy to an existing user
 Part 9: Using exception policies
 Part 10: Viewing your policy settings

This chapter is an excerpt from the book, Survival Guide for Lotus Notes and Domino Administrators, authored by Mark Elliott, published by IBM Press, March 2009, ISBN 0137153317, Copyright 2009 by International Business Machines Corporation. All rights reserved. For more info, please visit the publisher site. Safari Books Online subscribers can also access the book at safari.com. Click here for the chapter download.