Rob Kirkland goes light on straight documentation of features, which is a reasonable thing to do in a book aimed at people who already know their way around the Notes/Domino environment. Instead, he emphasizes how aspects of the systems (such as SMTP mail routing and the Domino Directory) operate before explaining how the administrator should work with them. This approach manifests itself sometimes in some explicitly stated procedures, but more often in prose and tables that take into account the variations among individual instances of Notes and Domino. He is also careful to highlight differences among versions, and is always quick to point out strategies for minimizing time spent on the repetitive aspects of the administrator's job. Kirkland's practical-minded text, loaded with details, will appeal to administrators as they solve problems on the job and study for Lotus certification. --David Wall
Topics covered: Installation and operation of Lotus Notes and Domino 5 systems. Extensive attention is devoted to setting up initial and subsequent servers, upgrading from Release 4.x, user registration, client setup, mail routing, replication, security, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) services, databases, and Web services.