USER AND SERVER CONFIGURATION

Using auto-populated groups
The auto-populated groups feature uses predefined criteria to automatically determine and update group membership. Use the auto-populated groups feature to apply policies to users and groups based on their home servers. Use the Group document to create a home server group whose group members use the specified server as their home mail server. Assign a policy to that group. That policy applies to everyone in the home server group. Any updates to the home server's group membership automatically impacts which users the policy is applied to. Use this feature to greatly reduce the work required to keep groups updated.

Note For IBM Lotus Domino 8.5, Home Servers is the only auto-populate method available.

When you are creating a group and specifying group members in the Members field, if large numbers of names are retrieved from the Domino Directory, you may reach a limit as to how many names can be retrieved. If you reach the name lookup limit, you will see the following Domino Domain Monitor (DDM) event when viewing DDM events:


To prevent this from happening, use the following server NOTES.INI setting to increase the limit from 1MB to a value greater than one.
Start by increasing the value to 2MB and continue increasing the value until you do not reach a limit as to the number of names that can be retrieved.

Auto-populated groups can have subgroups. When an auto-populated group becomes large, subgroups are automatically created for the auto-populated group to hold all of the members of the group. The subgroup names have the following format:


For example, if the auto-populated group name is Home Mail Server, the first automatically created subgroup for that group has the following name:
An auto-populated group can be used anywhere that a static group can be used, including as a subgroup in another group.

Note You cannot manually create an auto-populated subgroup and you cannot modify or edit the Members field.

The Domino update task runs on the Domino administration server and processes group documents by locating changes to those documents or to users and groups in the Domino Directory. The group document is searched for predefined criteria according to the auto-populated method you specify in the field "Auto-Populate Method" on the Group document. The entries in the fields "Additional Members" and "Excluded Members" are also used to determine the final group membership. If the final group membership list differs with the membership specified in the group document, the group document is updated. You specify how often the update task runs by specifying an update interval in the field "Auto-populated group Members update interval" in the Domino Directory Profile document.

Note Auto-populated groups that contain subgroups should not be copied and pasted in the Domino Directory because they contain references to their subgroups; therefore, a copied and pasted auto-populated group refers to the same subgroups as the original group.

Auto-populated groups are available from the Domino Administrator, not from the Domino Web Administrator.

Setting up auto-populated home server groups

Complete these steps to set up an auto-populated home server group.

1. Set up a Home Server auto-populated group in a Group document.

2. Specify the update interval for auto-populated groups in the Domino Directory Profile document. This interval is read by the update process when it starts up. If you change the update interval setting, you need to restart the update process to make the change take effect.

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