Just Enough Governance for Notes Blog

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I was in France recently facilitating a 2-day Teamstudio training/workshop at a large French bank in La Défense, Paris. I had arranged to visit the customer on the day before the event to prepare the training room but, at the last minute, my contact was called to a meeting and I was not able to do the setup. The developers did not have laptops, so the company provided a batch from a pool of machines retained for training purposes. Great. Unfortunately, when we started up the computers we found that although Notes had been installed, Domino Designer hadn't. As this session was about using Teamstudio tools to develop & maintain applications, this was a problem... Worse, the machines were ultra-secure. USB disabled, limited rights etc.

Happily, one of the developers, Pascal, reminded me of a little trick. If you simply create a text file in the Notes executable directory called designer.exe then Designer suddenly becomes available - launch the Notes client and you'll now see the Designer icon in the bookmarks bar. Don't believe me? I didn't the first time I heard of this trick! Try it out for yourselves. Is this a security loophole? Well, technically not; if your ACLs are set correctly you have nothing to worry about. Even so, I can think of some users in some companies who should not be allowed in the same building as a Designer client. So, let's just keep this little trick to ourselves. I won't tell anyone if you won't

I would be interested in hearing of any problems caused by this trick being exploited. And if anyone can remind me of the way to do this for Domino Administrator I would be most grateful.