The publication Who’s Who is a great British institution that I’ve always been vaguely aware of, but never knew too much about, until I looked into it this week. If you’ve never heard of it, or you’re not sure what it is, allow me to explain. Who’s Who contains autobiographical entries about more than 30,000 “notable” people who are deemed to have had an influence on British life. By “autobiographical,” I mean that the entries are written by the people who they are about, and there is apparently no limit to the amount you can write about yourself, should you be invited to do so. Not just anybody gets an entry in Who’s Who, of course, those who are considered worthy are invited by the current editor, who is not credited.
Who’s Who was first published in 1849, at which time it included mostly serving politicians, high ranking members of the clergy and the royal household. Initially, people’s names only were listed, but the full biographies have been included since 1897. If you are listed in Who’s Who, but you are unfortunate enough to die, then your entry is moved to the companion work, named “Who Was Who,” where it remains in perpetuity.
The Brits, of course, love all this stuff. They have Burke’s Peerage, which is your handy-dandy guide to the British aristocracy (technically “the Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Landed Gentry of the United Kingdom“). Then of course, there’s Debrett’s Peerage, which seems to serve largely the same purpose. (As a side note, Debrett’s is probably better known for their advice on British etiquette. The section on dining, for example, contains useful tips, such as “never use chopsticks to point at other people.”)
Who’s Who though, is really just a posher version of any number of directories that list and classify people. I am personally quite familiar with the concept of a telephone directory, having been tasked with copying out pages of said document by hand as a punishment for certain misdemeanors back in high school in the mid-70s. The teacher, of course, would take great pleasure in ripping up my carefully written pages as soon as I handed them in. The point is, that for hundreds of years, we’ve been cataloging people and their contact information.
What about your IBM Notes and Domino user community? We often hear that getting a good sense of who your users are, and especially what access levels they have, can be quite difficult to achieve. That is one small part of why we created Teamstudio Adviser. Adviser periodically scans and catalogs your Notes and Domino application environment. Its primary purpose is to help you get a view of your application landscape: how many apps do you have, where are they located, how much are they being used and by whom. But almost a side benefit of the product is that it also builds a catalog of users.
Once the catalog of users has been built, there are multiple ways you can sort and search them. For example, you can view members of groups across all name and address books, with nested group membership expanded out.
By clicking on a user’s name, you can see all the groups that that user belongs to, either directly or via membership of nested groups. Probably the most powerful feature of the user catalog in Adviser is the ability to analyze effective access. From the user view above, you can select the Effective Access - Databases section to see a list of all databases that user has access to, along with the level of access that they have. You can even see how that level of access is afforded to the user: whether their name appears directly in the ACL, or if they get access via membership of a group. This can be extremely useful when deleting users from the environment, or simply trying to troubleshoot unexpected ACL issues.
These are just a small subset of the ways in which you can explore your IBM Notes and Domino application environment with Teamstudio Adviser. To learn more about Adviser, click below, or contact us. You may not be invited to provide a biography for Who’s Who, but at least you can keep a careful eye on who’s who in your Notes and Domino application environment.