Symetrik Domino Consulting

It’s shocking. simply shocking.

I reported a few days ago that I finally got all of the Domino servers in our environment to 6.5.6 FP3 (plus a couple of Hotfixes – the DWA on Windows Vista, and Out of Office Hot Fix).

I have been noticing a few small things that have not been working as I thought they would. Very minor, but nonetheless weren’t working right.

So I decided to update the design of our customized NAB template. Let me prelude this with saying that I joined this rag tag Domino admin group 15 months ago. There were 2 guys running it, one with a developer background and one with no Lotus Notes/Domino experience at all. They’d both learned everything on the job, and they had both inherited it from a couple of guys who had obviously installed Domino only by the sheer merit of being able to read the instruction manual.

The design changes aren’t that bad actually, except for the fact that no one really knows why the 30 or so non-standard agents are for. Upon digging through the design, I found that the most of the design element are 6.0 design!!!!

I used Team Studio Delta for most of the work. I found only a few views, which were pretty obvious, Person document, Server document, and a bunch of agents.

Some of the changes were for our confidential messaging 3rd party product called Enigmator. The developers sent us the changes required, but actually, I found a few more than they sent us.

Some of the other changes were very minor such as the fact that someone had once upon a time added an OU column to the person view.

The worse part of the changes are the agents. Some of them are shared, some are private. Some of them are only in the NAB with “prohibit design replace or refresh to modify” and some are in the template with “prohibit design replace or refresh to modify.”

What agitates me is that we have an outsource company who we’ve purchased the Enigmator product from, that also did some customizations for us in the past, and they NEVER bothered to comment anything.

I’m theorizing that the person who hired them, who used to be part of their company, might have received kickbacks and didn’t mind for them to potentially charge us in the future for such detective work on figuring out what was what. Maybe, I’m just being cynical.

…but R6.0 design in an environment that’s been running 6.5.4 (5 year old code by the way) for a long time now…. /me scratches head.