One of the things that I've noticed in my (sometimes too frequent!) travels is that it's a common practice of businesses that use Lotus Domino to cascade one or more Public Address Books on the Domino server. For those of you who aren't familiar with this practice, cascading is the act of having more than one address book on a Domino server or remote Notes workstation. These additional address books can then be used for type-ahead addressing and name resolution by the Domino mail subsystems.

It seems to be a widespread practice particularly in multi-domain environments and in organizations that have frequent email contact with a relatively small number of external people. Cascading address books are particularly helpful for administrators because they reduce mail-addressing problems for your end-user community. It also gives administrators more time because, while you probably want to have your primary address book locked down security wise, the cascaded address books can be more open for editing by anyone within your organization.

The purpose of this article is to show you how to make your new or existing Notes application databases work like Public Address Books so that they can be cascaded on the Domino server or your remote Notes workstations.

What's needed?
What design elements need to be present in a database in order for cascading email addressing and type-ahead to work correctly? That question can be answered in three words: "fields and views". From a configuration standpoint, you'll also need to modify NOTES.INI files on your servers and workstations to take advantage of the application databases being cascaded. I'll discuss each of the needed items in detail below.

Where should we begin? Because of their selection formula requirements, I'll start with the required views first.

Which view will do for you?
Any email functionality analysis of Domino Public Address Books reveals that there are some views which are version specific and some views which are required by all of the Notes 4.x clients. The views that you'll need in your application will depend on what version of Notes client you've deployed. I'll discuss the views that are required by all of the clients first, and then I'll discuss the release-specific views. By the way, for the purposes of this article we're only going to be examining Notes 4.x clients.