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Unread marks auditing plus Design Dumps…

Every Domino Admin worth their salt will have experienced  incidents with unread marks not working correctly and will have “fixed” these in variety of ways, mainly either marking all documents as read, or exchanging unread marks between replicas

There’s another type of unread marks issue, where someone wants to audit unread marks (i.e. find out who has read a document and when).  Well IBM can provide with a free auditing tool that does just that (amongst other useful Developer type functions).

From the about page of application:

“Welcome to the Toolbox Database

Introduction

The Toolbox database (toolbox.nsf) is designed to help administrators or advanced users troubleshoot issues with Unread Marks in a Lotus® Notes® database.  It can also be used for troubleshooting replication issues and design template issues.  Currently there are six major features in the Toolbox database. These are as follows:

  • Dump design documents: This feature enables users to dump information about all design documents in the database. Toolbox provides information on these attributes: NoteID, UNID, Sequence Time, Sequence, and UpdatedBy.  The output is sorted by Class Name and UNID.  This feature enable users to quickly identify who updated design documents, when they where updated, and how many times the documents were updated.
  • Dump design documents (long format) : This feature is the same as “Dump design documents” but provides more detailed information about each design document.  Additional information includes the document Title, Creation Time, and Last Modification Time.
  • Dump the NoteID and UNID :  This feature dumps the NoteID, UNID, Create time and Last Modified time for a database, database view, or single document to a log file. This log enables the user to take a quick inventory of the documents in the database or view. Then, when unread marks or replication issues are suspected, the user can dump the NoteID and UNID log again and compare the two logs to identify which document was changed.
  • Dump unread activity logs (local db only) :  This feature dumps the user’s unread activity log for a database, database view, or a single document to a log file. This feature works only on a local database that is not encrypted.  Also, the database must be enabled for unread replication.
  • Dump unread mark list : This feature dumps the unread mark list for a database, database view, or a single document into a log file. This feature works for any accessible local or remote database. This feature works only on a database that is not encrypted.  Also, the database must be enabled for unread replication.
  • Toolbox Add-in Menu : This feature adds the following Toolbox menu items to the Actions menu:  “Display info on selected Document”, “Dump design documents”, “Dump design documents (long format)”. These menus are enabled whenever the user is in a view to execute the action.”

There isn’t an Internet link per se for for the tool, but if you ask IBM Support nicely for it in a PMR they will provide it for you and it is intuitive to use.  IBM should probably have a technote on this as I think people would use it if they knew about it and it was freely downloadable (IBM take note !).

Please let us know if you end up using the application as a result of this post!

Cormac McCarthy – Domino People Ltd.

 

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