Lotus Notes Reader Names field
We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of critical situations related to Lotus Notes Reader Names fields and Lotus Notes views. Customers find that performance is unacceptable frequently throughout the day. They cannot understand why because the code reviews and pilot tests all went smoothly. But a few months after roll out to their entire department/division/company, they find that complaints about performance are dominating conversations with their employees, and something has to be done.
Our favorite examples are HR and Sales Force applications — both of which typically have stringent Reader Names controls. The following table illustrates a hypothetical scenario for a company using a database of 400,000 documents.
| Title/role | Number of documents user can see (out of 400,000) | Percent of database |
| Corporate HQ, CEO, CIO, Domino administrators, developers | 400,000 | 100 percent |
| District Manager | 4,000 | 1 percent |
| Manager | 400 | 0.1 percent |
| Employee | 40 | 0.01 percent |
Upper management and the Domino administrators and developers typically experience pretty good performance, which makes the first reports of poor performance easy to ignore. Performance problems are typically exacerbated by weaker connectivity (WAN versus LAN), which may also make the early complaints seem invalid. But after some critical number of complaints have been registered, someone sits down at a workstation with an employee and sees just how long it takes to open the database or to save a document, and then the alarm bells start ringing. Figure 3 shows how long it took a user to open a view in the sample database with 400,000 documents. All views were already refreshed. No other activity was taking place on the test server, and only one user at a time was accessing the server.
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