When you work on a software product that integrates with other manufacturer’s software, the parts on both sides are always moving, sometimes to your own product’s detriment (i.e. a change on the other side conflicts with your integration) and sometimes to your benefit (i.e. an enhancement on the other side looks a great idea to build upon and equally enhance your solution). The change detailed in this IBM wiki article provided us with such an opportunity in Enterprise Vault 11
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/lotus-inotes-how-to-enable-a-custom-forms-database
When we first integrated with iNotes (formerly Domino Web Access) in Domino 6.5x and 7.x.x, the only place we could ‘hook’ into this web based mail activity for any and all of our Enterprise Vault customizations was deep in the javascript based bowels of the Forms*.nsf file on the production mail server. In Domino 8.5.1, IBM began to embrace the concept of iNotes customizations and introduced the Extension Forms File (http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/customization-updates-for-... ) allowing many of the obvious customizations to be maintained in their own separate database (Forms*_x.ntf). This allowed us to move a great deal of our code out of the Forms*.nsf database into its own home but our integration in some areas was at such a low level and still less ‘obvious’ than IBM now supported that some changes to Forms*.nsf were still required.
Beginning with Enterprise Vault 11 and IBM Domino 9 though, we have successfully implemented the guidance of that wiki article to now deploy our customizations to their own unique Forms file and not the pre-existing production one on Domino 9 servers
Some pretty pictures of the change
Benefits of the change
- Reduced risk of changing Domino production code
- EVInstall.nsf no longer makes changes to existing Domino server Forms9.nsf databases
- EVInstall.nsf will mirror the ‘make EV copy, then customize EV copy’ model of mail template customization
- Simplified deployment of EV extensions
- No requirement to back-up the existing Formsx.nsf database prior to running EVInstall.nsf
- No requirement to find and redeploy your back-up copy of the original Formsx.nsf prior to re-running EVInstall.nsf on every hotfix, CHF, service pack or major release upgrade of Enterprise Vault
- No requirement to manipulate the overly secure ACLs of FormsX.nsf