“Bad” Technical Answers to Problems

Not much posting recently because nothing profound has been going on. We’ve been moving Notes apps over to SharePoint, doing east stuff first. Simple forms and workflows that can turn into a sharepoint list, calendars, discussions, etc.

Just a couple tidbits we’ve learned:

1) If a user needs to see the old data for a fixed amount of time, we decided migrating the data to SharePoint is wasted effort. Instead, just give them a web interface to the Notes data, either in a new window or an Iframe from the SharePoint UI. Customer are very pleased with this.

2) Icons in columns – We don’t think much of this as developers… sure, we can put up a green checkbox or some other icon in a Notes column. It is such an easy feature, it threw us for a loop when SharePoint couldn’t do something so simple in a column. But it can be done with Dataviews. So we’ve had to pick up some more Designer and XSLT skills to match the options available to us in Notes. Same thing when trying to calculate anything based on “multiple lines of text”. Can’t be done as a standard list option… needs to be done via XSLT in a dataview.

But the real reason I wanted to post was to share our new “Bad” answers to strange, unexplicable problems in SharePoint.

We realized that, as many Notes Devs know, sometimes a problem just isn’t easy to diagnose, and some folks have standarized answers that sound plausible, but which are totally false, and just server to get people off our back while we figure out the real problem. I’ve gotten over this bad habit as I’ve aged, and now freely admit, “I dunno… lemme go figure it out.”, but I still hear plenty of Notes folks who says things like. “Hmm… there must be some database corruption. I’ll go work on it.”. Which often means the same thing as “I dunno.”

So in jest, we came up with the two following statements in cases of unexplained SharePoint problems when you just want the boss off your back so you can go find a real answer:

1) “It sounds like an Office 2007 integration bug.” – for end-user problems.
2) “That sounds like a timer job issue.” – for server-related issues.