Using auto-populated groups

Use the Group document to create a home server group whose group members use the specified server as their home mail server. Assign a policy to that group. That policy applies to everyone in the home server group. Any updates to the home server's group membership automatically impacts which users the policy is applied to. Use this feature to greatly reduce the work required to keep groups updated.

When you are creating a group and specifying group members in the Members field, if large numbers of names are retrieved from the Domino® Directory, you may reach a limit as to how many names can be retrieved. If you reach the name lookup limit, you will see the following Domino® Domain Monitor (DDM) event when viewing DDM events:

Search for auto-populated group members failed for group Server1MBUsers.: NAMELookups are limited on this server to a size smaller than what would be returned. See your Domino® Administrator for more information..

To prevent this from happening, use the following server NOTES.INI setting to increase the limit from 1MB to a value greater than one.

Namelookup_max_mb=1

Start by increasing the value to 2MB and continue increasing the value until you do not reach a limit as to the number of names that can be retrieved.

Auto-populated groups can have subgroups. When an auto-populated group becomes large, subgroups are automatically created for the auto-populated group to hold all of the members of the group. The subgroup names have the following format:

auto-populated group name-APXXXXX

where XXXXX = a number preceded by zeros

For example, if the auto-populated group name is Home Mail Server, the first automatically created subgroup for that group has the following name:

Home Mail Server-AP00001

An auto-populated group can be used anywhere that a static group can be used, including as a subgroup in another group.

The Domino® update task runs on the Domino® administration server and processes group documents by locating changes to those documents or to users and groups in the Domino® Directory. The group document is searched for predefined criteria according to the auto-populated method you specify in the field Auto-Populate Method on the Group document. The entries in the fields Additional Members and Excluded Members are also used to determine the final group membership. If the final group membership list differs with the membership specified in the group document, the group document is updated. You specify how often the update task runs by specifying an update interval in the field Auto-populated group Members update interval in the Domino® Directory Profile document.