Lotus Domino offers fantastic power to organizations that want to manage communication so that news and ideas get to the people who need them with minimal hassle, both in terms of user trouble and administrator effort. Lotus Domino Administration in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference is designed to ease the Notes administrator's job even further, by providing a concise list of tools and procedures that come into play during the setup and day-to-day operation of a Notes environment. This book won't be much help to you if you're completely new to Notes, but it may well save your day if you work with multiple groupware environments (perhaps as a consultant) or if you've been called on to make a structural change in a Notes installation that's gone generally untouched for some time. It'll also back you up if you're fresh from Notes training and need help on the job.

This book excels in its documentation of command-line utilities and the entries that appear in the NOTES.INI file. The latter occupies nearly a third of this book, which lists every possible entry that the NOTES.INI parser understands. Each entry appears with its proper syntax, as well as its legal values. You'll find well-reasoned descriptions of each entry as well, along with references to related entries. Documentation of utilities (which are categorized by functional unit such as mail) is similar. --David Wall

Topics covered: The tools and settings with which administrators of Lotus Notes need to be familiar. Sections explain the Notes database infrastructure, its methods of routing and tracking mail, and its performance-monitoring utilities. More focused sections show how Notes works with the Domino environment, Domino Enterprise Connection Services (DECS), and Internet Cluster Manager (ICM). A long section documents NOTES.INI values.