Gee... David

Exam Objective: Creating Dynamic Policies

A new feature to the administrative capabilities of Domino is the dynamic policy. This option allows administrators to assign policy settings to individual users and groups by entering a particular user or group name in a policy document.

By way of review, an explicit policy document allows assignment of default settings to users and groups such as

With dynamic policies administrators are able to "set it and forget it" the assignment by using updates the group document as needed. This way, if a user moves to a new  position in the company, the administrator does not need to figure out which policies are involved.
When is the change 'effective'. According to the InfoCenter, “The updated group information is applied the next time the effective policy is calculated for any users in that group.”

How do I do that?
There are four ways to assign explicit policies:

•        Use the Policy Assignment tab of the policy document (explicit policy)
•        When registering a user.
•        Edits to the user's Person document.
•        Use the policy assignment tool in the Domino Administrator client.


I have decided to provide an example of the process when registering a user as the InfoCenter has plenty of information for the other approaches. Additionally, this example shows the 'magical' consequence of removing a user from a group to which the policy is applied.

First, the environment. We have created a settings document and a policy with which it is associated:




We have also defined a group named “Contractors” and have assigned the policy to that group.



When Registering a user:

The user is configured in the usual way including membership in the group, “Contractors”




Now for the 'big reveal'. First:
But, when we perform a policy synopsis we see the effective policy.


Now, for the magic. We will remove Sue Synergy from the “Contractors” group and repeat the synopsis.



And, here's the result:


Things to keep in mind include the latency of updates to the group membership cache. By default this will occur once per minute but is configurable. Also, keep in mind how different settings are achieved. An excellent resource is the Wiki article at

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/domino-policies-faq