Survey: email model

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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We are currently reviewing our email infrastructure and I am curious as to how other organisations may be running their Notes Mail.

Do you centralise mail in one location and have all your users connect via the WAN?

or do you use regional mail servers and have all users in a region connect to it?

or put a mail server at every location?

Do you create replicas of mail files on all your workstations or access them from the server?

If you create local replicas of mail files, how often do you replicate them?

Thanks in advance,

Simon

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Subject: Survey: email model

I think the answers you get may not give you what you really need to know/consider.

Typology of a multi-location set-up may differ between multiple in-countty locations vs. miltiinternational locations, the type of connections available, the need for replicated e-mail based on any number of conditions. You are a multi-national corporation so the factors just grow exponentially.

I think you would be better off doing an assessment of your needs without pointing to other examples or you may end up straying down the wrong path unintentionally.

We have resources in your area that are experienced in global Notes deployments that can conduct an infrastructure assessment and help walk you through this process.

If you are interested, please send me an email at lotushelp2003NOSPAM@yahoo.com (taking out the NOSPAM of course).

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Subject: RE: Survey: email model

Alternatively, let us know what you’ve got planned on here and we’ll tell you if it’s a good idea or not.

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Subject: Survey: email model

Well, it depends on several factors, but mainly on WAN lines.

If the links have the sufficient capacity, I believe that the best thing is a central server for all the users since it reduces the complexity of the administration and facilitates the backup tasks.

We used this scheme, but the users in the regional offices have increased over the capacity of the connections and we have had to install additional servers in these offices.

With this config (typical hub&spoke topology) we replicate mail files each 2 hours between regional and central server in order to have a consolidated copy of all DB’s to make backup.

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Subject: RE: Survey: email model

Thanks for your responses.

I am aware there are many factors to this decision.

But I was more interested in what other people were doing, and what their experiences were, rather than offers of consultancy!!!

Simon

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Subject: RE: Survey: email model

I didn’t offer consultancy, simply shared our experience.

Repeat:

If you have good WAN lines I think is better only central servers. If not, you need regional servers.

In our config 128 Kb lines are totally insufficent to maintain more than 20-30 Notes users

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Subject: RE: Survey: email model

José,

I know you did not post a consultancy offer, and I appreciate the comments you made.

Simon

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Subject: RE: Survey: email model

I am the guilt party of the offer of consultancy simply because you cannot and should not design your infrastructure based on what people post here for some simple reasons:

  1. Each infrastructure is unique and has its own requirements which may or may not mirror what people post here. In fact, to get a full view, their posts would have to be so long and detailed that they are exposing their own organizations infrastructure when they should not be.

  2. Whatever is posted here may or may not be valid because who is to say if they did their infrastructure correctly or not. What you get here is free and you would have no one to hold accountable if things go wrong in your organization.

Bottom line is that you get what you pay for, which is why I am boggled when people post flames in here because someone’s suggested solution did not work!