Overview

In Domino 8.5 two new features were added that affect the policy space, Dynamic Polices and Home Server groups. While Home Server groups can be used independently from dynamic policies, they can be used together to make it even easier to manage user settings. In this example, Message Recall will be enabled for all of the mail users in a cluster that contains two servers (ServerA and ServerB).

Creating the Groups

The first step is to create two Home Server groups, one for each server in the cluster. To do this you:
1) Navigate to the Groups view in the Domino Directory and click the Add Group action.
2) Enter "Server A Home Server Group" for the Group Name.
3) Change the "Auto Populate Method" value from "None" to "Home Server". Note that the Home Server(s) field now appears.
4) Enter "ServerA" in the Home Server(s) field or use the picker to select it. Note: Both ServerA and ServerB could be selected here, but since this group might be used in the future for other activity specific to ServerA we will keep it just the one server.
5) Click the Save & Close action button.


6) Repeat steps 1-5 for using ServerB.
7) Navigate to the Groups view in the Domino Directory and click the Add Group action.
8) Enter "Mail Cluster" for the Group Name.
9) Either enter or select "Server A Home Server Group" and "Server B Home Server Group" in the Members field.
10) Click the Save & Close action button.


Populating the Groups

In the previous step the group were created, but there were no Members in the auto-populated groups. There is a thread in the update task on the server which does this work. It will perform this work on the interval defined in the Directory Profile (accessed via Actions->Edit Directory Profile):



The default is 30 minutes. But it you don't want to wait for the update task to run go to the server console and enter "tell autopop process". This will cause the update task to immediately update the groups.

Creating the Mail Settings document

Now that we have the groups created and populated, we next have to create the Mail settings document. To do that, perform these steps:
1) Navigate to the People->Policies->Settings view in the Domino Directory and click the Add Settings action and choose Mail.
2) On the Basic tab, enter "Mail Recall Example" for the Name.
3) Navigate to the Mail->Message Recall tab.
4) Choose Yes for the "User is allowed to recall sent message" field.
5) Choose Yes for the "Other user are allowed to recall messages they sent to this user" field.
6) Choose Unread Only for the "Allow recall of messages with unread status" field.
7) Click the Save & Close action button.



Creating the Dynamic Policy

The last step is to create the actual policy to apply the mail settings. To do that, perform these steps:

1) Navigate to the People->Policies view in the Domino Directory and click the Add Policy action.
2) On the Basics tab, enter "Mail Recall Policy" for the Policy Name.
3) Next to the Setting Type of Mail, enter or select "Mail Recall Example".



4) On the Policy Assignment tab, either select or enter the group "Mail Cluster".


5) Click the Save & Close action button.

Conclusion

Now that the dynamic policy has been created the new settings will be automatically applied to the mail users of the cluster when they next connect to the server. The "Recall Message" action will appear when they are in their Sent folder:



And now the administrator has no more maintenance steps to do whenever users are added to or removed from the servers in the cluster. Even if a user is renamed on one of the servers in the cluster, the old name will be removed from the Home Server group and the new name will be added automatically. And if an additional server is brought into the cluster, all the admin would have to do is to create another Home Server group for that server and and the new group into the "Mail Cluster" group. In the past, if explicit policies were used and applied to a group only the members in the group at that time would receive the policy. As the membership of that group changed, the admin would have to manually either re-apply to policy or go into individual person documents to add or remove the policy. So the combination of dynamic policies and Home Server groups removes a great deal of administration work. In addition to using the groups to apply policies, an administrator can also use the groups so send a message to all of the users of the cluster informing them, for example, that the server is being upgrading over the weekend.

Of course, the strategy employed here can be used to control other features as well not just Message Recall. So give it a try and rollout other new 8.5 features like ID vault, file based Roaming, or DAOS.