The Domino Chick

Policies Modification

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

For my very first Show 'n' Tell Thursday post, I am going to show you how to modify a user's location document, preferences, or client-side notes.ini variable with customized settings documents. Back in October of 2004, Ed mentioned that you could modify the ini with customized policies, and there is a technote documenting this "undocumented" feature. In this post, I will walk you through the customization and show you how you can use it to populate a field in a location document that is not included in the out-of-the-box settings document.

First, I will need to modify a subform in the Domino Directory called $ClientPreferenceSubform. This subform contains fields that affect both the Desktop and Setup settings documents, so keep that in mind when modifying it. Of course, you don't have to put anything in the fields that you create in this subform, so it won't affect any users who have a Setup or Desktop settings document applied to them in a policy unless you do populate the field on the settings document.

The next step is to find out the name of the field I want to modify in the location document. For this example, I am going to change the field that indicates when my Notes client will log on to Sametime. The field name is "SametimeLogonWhen". Next, I will create a field on the Client Preferences subform that corresponds to this field. Since the location document field is a dialog list, I will also create this field as a dialog list and paste in the choices from the field on the location document.



Note that the field name is prepended with LocAll. This is how you indicate that the field to be pushed down to the client is a location document field. Once I have saved this subform, I just need to go into the Desktop settings document, choose an option, and apply the settings and policies as I normally would. Any user who is affected by a policy containing this modified settings document will now have the new value pushed to their location document.



If you want to push down a notes.ini variable (or a user preference, since all user preferences correspond to a notes.ini variable), do the same thing, but prepend the field with $Pref instead of LocAll.

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 03:39:46 PM