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If you're looking to add a discussion board to your Lotus Domino-based intranet, you may find that the built-in discussion template that ships with the server is somewhat lacking. Luckily you can find a full-featured open-source alternative in domBulletin.

domBulletin is available at OpenNTF.org, and has proven popular enough that even IBM itself has used the application during the past couple of Lotusphere conferences.

Creating the domBulletin Application

Download the application from OpenNTF.org. For this article, we are using domBulletin 1.2.

Add a new database from the domBulletin12.ntf template to the server and sign it with an appropriate ID file that can run agents on the server. If you are not sure how to add a database to the server, you can follow the directions from a previous article.

The download also comes with a Sessions12.ntf template. The sessions database is used to track activity of the last 30 users to access the application. For the purposes of this article we will not be enabling that feature, so you can ignore that database.

Your ACL (Access Control List) Settings

The way you set up your ACL on your domBulletin app depends on whether or not you wish to allow anonymous access to the discussions.

If you wish to allow anonymous access to the database then Anonymous needs to have Author access, be able to create documents, and have the [ForumUser] role. It should look like the screen shot at the end of this article.

If you do not wish for Anonymous users to have the ability to post or read the discussions, simply give the Anonymous user No Access.

You'll also wish to set up any authenticated users (like DiscussionUsers above) the same as we did Anonymous in the above screenshot. They should have Author access, with the ability to create documents, and the [ForumUser] role.

There are a couple other roles you need to be aware of. The [ForumMaster] role is used for your database administrator and gives access to the configuration areas. The [ForumPoll] role allows users to set up poll questions, and [ForumMainPoster] allows a user to post Main topics.

Initial Configuration

Once you have your ACL setup, it's time to configure the database. Make sure you access the database with the ID you've given the [ForumMaster] role to. When you open up the database for the first time, you get a nice setup wizard.

You can close the wizard. Step 1 instructed you to do set up the ACL and then get to the Administration pane. Once you close the wizard, you get to the main domBulletin screen. At the bottom left of the screen you will see an Administration button. Click it to get the administration area of the database.

Once there, the upper right hand corner of the screen has a Configure button. Click it to enter the configuration document.

There are a ton of configuration options so I'll try to go through each section item by item.

Authentication and Security