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Domino Designer Not Installed? No Problem

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.

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Comments

1 - As it comes, I had to 'perform' this trick on a Teamstudio training session in Germany as well. As far as I remember, the integration into the client ( icon etc. ) did not work for all the attendees. I also am sure, that some people should not be informed Emoticon

2 - I'm assuming a fake admin.exe would provide the same behavior for Domino Administrator, but haven't tested this.

3 - It's a good trick, but note that if you want to local web previews, it won't work -- a proper Designer installation includes some DLLs required by the web preview (i.e. nhttp) task

4 - Yes - it does work for admin.exe. The only additional issue is that you need to be able to replicate events4.ntf and domadmin.ntf to your local data directory, otherwise the admin client won't open.

5 - I've tried this with the latest 8.5 Beta for OSX. Navigating to the /MacOS folder in the Notes package, I created a file called 'Designer', did a "chmod x+u" and when I relaunched the client, the Designer option was indeed there. But clicking on it does nothing... OS X probably has other reqs beside that single change...

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