Fred Adams
Domino System Administrator
Fred is in charge of administering all of the mail and other “collaboration”
servers (Sametime and Quickplace) at Canadian Appraisal Associates. His group
is also in charge of the Blackberry (BES) servers that serve up Notes mail to
executives on their Blackberries. He sits with his 8 system administration
colleagues at the Canadian Appraisal headquarters in Vancouver, Canada. He’s
the team lead and the others call him “Adams the SuperAdmin.”
About Canadian Appraisal Associates:
They are the largest independent valuation consulting firm in Canada with 20
offices in Canada and the USA. Their clients range from the Fortune Global 500
to emerging companies that are defining new business opportunities—from
internet startups in Calgary, to clothing franchises in Quebec. The company is
divided into three divisions: Property Tax services, Property records, and
Leasing appraisals.
Fred’ Work Goals:
Keep those 12 mail servers (on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition 32-bit) up and
running, with 8,000 users, about half using Domino Web Access (some in French
for those folks in Montreal).
Keep the BES and Sametime servers up and running.
Keep the Domino Application servers up and running—there are 10 (non-mail) of
them. The company relies on them for their customized property records
applications and Human Resources. All the HR ones are web-based.
Make sure that all the databases replicate on time, as scheduled, and are
operating efficiently. He wants more diagnostic tools and live monitoring.
Wants to move to 7.0.1 or 8.0 so they can use DDM.
Keep up to date with email messaging infrastructures to make sure Canadian
Appraisal has the most appropriate messaging tools for its needs, including
spam filtering and virus protection software.
Keep up to date with BES or other mobile options (he’s very interested in this
new Notes traveler announcement that has been made recently)
Provide “advanced support” for end users with any problems they have using
email or other Lotus Domino collaboration databases (if the help desk could not
figure it out)
A good day for Fred is when he has time to install and play with something new
like Quickr or Lotus Symphony. He goes to Lotusphere every other year.
A bad day is when he is under pressure to fix a big mail problem, like one day
last week when he made a template change on one server and thought it had
replicated to the other mail servers, but it did not. He was getting lots of
calls and people stopping by his office complaining that their email was not
working.
He feels the most stress when the company upgrades to a new version of the
server or the Mail template. He tries not to customize the standard mail
template too much, but the company does require certain modifications. He does
upgrades at midnight, and on upgrade nights, he might stay at the office late
and once home, will VNC in to check on things.
He works closely with the other system admins, especially when it comes to
upgrading. Together they decide when to upgrade to a new version of Domino,
based on evaluations not only of the mail server portion, but other parts of
the Domino server and other important databases, such as the name and address
book.
Fred’ Tools:
Lotus Notes 6.5 client
Notes Administrator , (and Domino Designer once in a while))
“VNC’s into remote sites (he’s in charge of the mail and Domino servers in
Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal. There is a junior Domino admin at each of the
sites, but they often need help.).
EEC Appraisal’s own home-grown Lotus Notes databases for internal problem
reporting.
Firefox and IE
Feedreader – he subscribes to several Notes-related and other industry feeds
He has MS office installed because it’s the company standard, but he’s been
using OpenOffice for a while, and he’d love help the company get rid of MS
office in favor of Lotus Symphony (and he expects he’d get a big bonus for
helping the company to save millions)
Several 3rd party tools – Spam filtering, virus checking tools, server
monitoring
Blackberry Manager
He is not a Help Desk person, but when the help desk people cannot solve in
internal user’s problem with mail or another Notes database, the call will be
referred to him. His Blackberry is almost always on if anyone needs to reach
him. For middle-of-the-night emergencies, he brings his laptop home to he can
VPN in to diagnose or fix issues.
Personal Information
Fred has worked at Canadian appraisal for 10 years and has been working with
Domino since 4.6. The only reason he wears a tie to work is because the company
has a dress code. He is married to a schoolteacher (Linda) and has three pugs.
He lives in Surrey in an older 3-bedroom house. The rear deck has views across
the Fraser River to downtown Vancouver and the mountains. He and his wife like
to grill sockeye salmon and entertain there.
He takes the skytrain to work, but he and Linda own a red Honda Civic, which
they use to drive up to Whistler to ski. He’s also a tremendous Canucks hockey
fan and loves to talk hockey with the folks at work.
Fred’s pugs: named Max, Jake and Buster