Collecting information for a new administration ECL

Before you can create an Admin ECL to distribute, identify the individual people and/or organizations that you can trust to create and sign active content.

Before you begin

Identify a few users who use a broad range of typical IBM® Notes® applications, then ask them to complete these steps.

Procedure

  1. Remove all entries from the workstation ECL except the following:
    • All entries in the format */org, where org is a local domain/organization
    • The -Default- entry
    • The -No signature- entry
    • Lotus Notes Template Development/Lotus Notes

    To remove an entry, highlight the item to remove under When signed by, then click Remove.

    Note: If any of these entries are not listed in the ECL, it means that those entries are not needed.
  2. Make a list of the entries you remove so that if those entries were, in fact, not needed, they can later be added with No access in the administration ECL.
  3. Make the following changes to the When signed by and Allow fields for the remaining entries in the ECL:
    Table 1. ECL changes
    When signed by Allow

    */org, where org is a local domain/organization

    Deselect all selected items.

    -Default-

    Deselect all selected items. The entry Default should have no permissions.

    -No signature-

    Deselect all selected items.

    Lotus Notes® Template Development/Lotus Notes®

    Select all items. This signer should have all permissions.
  4. For a designated time period (a week should be sufficient), when the Execution Security Alert dialog box appears, click Trust signer, with the following exceptions:
    • Do not trust any actions with -No Signature-.
    • Check with the administrator before trusting odd or unfamiliar signatures or before clicking Execute once for templates and applications signed with odd or unfamiliar signatures.

Results

The resulting ECLs for these users should contain more signers than the ECL originally contained, unless your organization has managed the signing process up front and only uses objects signed by a small number of known trustworthy signers.

After the designated time period is complete, the administrator should combine the signatures in the users' ECLs to create an updated administration ECL.

The workstation ECL log

About this task

The Notes® client logs ECL-related operations in the Client log (LOG.NSF) in Miscellaneous Events. This includes:

  • Results of Execution Security Alert (ESA) dialogs, as well as additional ESA details. These details include information about the code that caused the ESA, such as the design type, design title, NotesID, database title, and path.
  • Any ECL modifications. This includes information on which ECL was modified; the ECL entries that were changed, added or deleted; and the rights that were granted or revoked. It also includes all ECL modifications resulting from such operations as dynamic ECL update, programmatic ECL refresh (@ECLRefresh function), setup ECL refresh/creation and manual ECL changes made in the ECL Editor or through the User Security Panel.

It is possible to write an agent to run on Notes® clients and parse the ECL logging data to provide administrators with specific information on how users are managing their workstation ECLs, as well as current information about applications or other code that should be added to Admin ECLs.