ServerAdmin Plus Success Stories - RAC

Extending Administration Across the Enterprise

The Business Challenge

Ever since its foundation in 1897, RAC has consistently been at the forefront in developing motoring services; from introducing uniformed patrols in 1901 and roadside emergency telephone boxes in 1912, right through to the present day when the RAC boasts the world's most advanced computer systems to deal with calls for roadside assistance. Now over 6 million RAC members enjoy access to an enormous range of motoring products, from roadside assistance to legal and technical advice.

As RAC expanded to meet their growing member base, the Domino administration team found themselves spending a great deal of time creating new users and removing old ones. This in turn, greatly increased the time spent cleaning up the environment of dead mail files. There was a requirement to remove this mundane and time-consuming task off the administration team and hand it over to some members of the help desk, a team who had little Domino administration skills.

Our main purpose was to incorporate some of our Help Desk users into the day-to-day administration tasks, such as creating, deleting and moving users. We needed to enable these functions, yet restrict others. ServerAdmin Plus achieved exactly that.
— Tim Wright, Network Analyst

The Axceler Solution

Axceler ServerAdmin Plus was first deployed into the Help Desk environment. The required members of the Help Desk team were added to a profile that enabled him or her to undertake these time consuming tasks on a daily basis without having to extend their administration knowledge. This was done without giving them access to the more advanced ServerAdmin Plus features, thus limiting what they could or could not do with the product.

With more free time, the administration team set about using ServerAdmin Plus' more advanced features such as the search and analysis modules, allowing them to undertake several tasks.

First they needed to locate redundant databases and dead or orphaned mail files. After running an analysis with the Mail File Analyzer, all users' mail files with little or no activity over a specified period of time were found. With one click from the Mail File Analyzer, the administrators were able to send individual emails to all the users asking if the mail file was being used. After a holding period, any mail files with no activity or replies were highlighted and deleted in one action. The administrators also performed an NSF Search to find all the applications not used within the last 12 months; these were also deleted or archived in one simple step.

On remaining mail files, quotas were set automatically, while another project then ran searches, identifying where users were reaching their quotas, automatically sending an email to the users warning them of this. Additional projects were run to tighten up ACL Security, including the Default and Anonymous entries.

The Result

RAC were able to complete tasks in a much shorter time period allowing them to focus on other areas. With a cleaner environment and a management policy in place for mail file quotas, RAC felt able to move forward into the next project - Server Consolidation. With the additional functionality in ServerAdmin Plus, this too will be completed with less administration effort and in an easier fashion.