To Admin or Not to Admin

Hi again,

There are many ways to manage this beast. In fact you could say there is the "by the book way" (IBMs recommendation), the derivation of by the book way, the down to earth way and probably many other flavors and styles. It really all depends at the end on the size of the corporation/company or the resources they are willing to spend.

My personal recommendation on a mid size global corporation (3000 or more users) would be as follows:
The assign commonstore admin should really be able to manage the whole chain of products with no help from others even though you might have an OS Admin (AIX, Windows, Linux, etc..), a db2 admin and a tsm admin. The commonstore admin really should oversee the entire forest.
See the link below.
http://commonstoreit.blogspot.com/2008/02/bridges-of-commonstore.html#links

If you are starting in CommonStore don't focus in CommonStore, first focus in getting a good handle of Content Manager and DB2. Maybe an analogy would be Windows vs Word , you have to get the back end configured correctly and then can focus on the front end.
A good CommonStore administrator is someone that has a good understanding on how Content Manager is structure and knows how to manage each component. A better CommonStore administrator is someone that besides ContentManager also has an intermediate db2 level. In other words the two most important elements for CommonStore are Content Manager and DB2, but please don't get me wrong because if you do the installation and configuration right from the beginning then most of your daily admin work will still be CommonStore and not Content Manager or DB2.

How much Websphere and Apache should you know? Some basic admin functions and the installation procedure for them is enough.

How much TSM should you know? Well it all depends if you have a tsm admin to help you. TSM itself is pretty stable and will not give you to much work but in case of a disaster recovery situation you better have a way to recover all the containers and the information store through tsm into long term storage.

How much CommonStore should you know? Commonstore itself does not have to many elements to master, but it can become a complex subject if you need to change the basic configuration, and you probably will since we are assuming a midsize corporation and above. It is the younger brother of all the components that are part of this archiving framework, so in my personal experience it is the least robust one!!! It is getting there and lets hope with 8.4 there will be many more improvements.

How much Lotus Notes/Domino Admin and Designer should you know? Depends if you plan to change the mail template for CommonStore and how much you want to architect the structure of the crawlers, archiving and retrieving tasks.. In other words from intermediate admin level to intermediate development script level.

Well this is my "personal experience" and I am just sharing it with you. There is nothing written on the "how to's" of CommonStore so I am not responsible for my experience not working for you, but I do hope is useful and helps you save some time and get you up to speed faster. I am assuming you are new to this subject, if not please share your thoughts on how to manage it with us I would love to learn from you.

Until later