Ecora Corporation (at https://www.ecora.com) attempts to address this with the Documentor suite of report generators. Be aware that if you click on that link, you will be trapped on Ecora's Web page and unable to hit the back button and return to this DominoPower article.

I will only focus on Documentor for Lotus Domino, but they also offer Documentor for Cisco Routers, Microsoft Exchange, Windows NT/2000, Oracle Databases, and Sun Solaris. I used the software application version you run locally. Ecora also offered a version online, but with firewall restrictions for server access and Active-X controls, many enterprises probably won't find the Web version a viable solution.

Documentor for Lotus Domino requires that the client run Windows NT Workstation or Server or Windows 2000 Professional. Documentor utilizes a Notes ID and password that has a minimum of reader rights to the Domino Directory, so you must have Lotus Notes 4.6x or 5.x client installed on the machine also. There are no installations necessary on the Domino servers at all for the product to run. Internet Explorer 5.0 SP1 is also required, according to the Ecora Web site, but I did my testing with Netscape 4.74 loaded and didn't see anything out of the ordinary.

When you run Ecora Documentor for Lotus Domino, you're presented with a simple Windows interface, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


Ecora Documentor has a simple Windows interface. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The first time you run the Documentor, it asks some basic user information (your name, email address, and organization) before you can proceed. You then enter the Domino server(s) you wish to generate a report for as well as select the items you want the Documentor to report on. Ecora suggests that you run the Documentor on a hub server to get the most information. From there you simply run the generator and sit back and wait for the reports.

There are about ten items from which you can select for the Documentor to run reports on. It covers most of the major items you find in the Server views in your Domino Directory. Ecora also has a setting to run a report for Databases, Access Control Lists, and User Types, but I'm not quite sure what databases it checks or what it reports. The version I ran was the one before this new feature was added. Documentation showed that it would report basic settings, like database titles and file name, information on disk space, percent used and number of documents, and even design and replication information.