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1 - Depends on the problem being fixed by the refresh and if it's impacting business or cash flow.

If it's something trivial being corrected, say a mis-spelled word or something of that sort, it can wait until the nightly refresh. If it's impacting business or cash flow then it should be implemented immediately, tested and signed off on by the customer.

Keith

2 - In answer to the first (sort of) question: yes if an update is urgent I wouldn't wait for the overnight refresh (but it has be really urgent - e.g. it is costing the business real money now).

The answer to the second is easy: I can't think of one time where a design refresh didn't work for me. There are a couple of times where the design refresh was the suspect in relation to a problem. There have also been a handful of times where I swear the design refresh isn't working right and it turns out to be fine (e.g. missed a prohibit design refresh check - doh!).

Otherwise I'd say the design refresh task (certainly R6 onwards) is very robust.

3 - We never allow the scheduled Design task to implement a code change. In fact, we do not run Design as a scheduled task. We always implement changes deliberately and explicitly, as part of our process control.

4 - @3 Rob,

I can agree with that to an extent. The applications provided by Lotus when you install the server, we do allow the design refresh on these, but not on custom applications. This has worked well and saved us when an administrator or someone had changed the design of the domino directory by accident. The Design task ran that night and corrected the issue.

5 - I rarely rely on the scheduled Design task for application changes. The whole template/design task is fine for standard databases, but most of the apps I support are getting way too complicated for that.

Some changes are simple, but many changes I make also require keyword documents or settings to be updated, sometimes agents to modify fields on existing documents to work with the new design, etc. These additional changes need to be applied and tested as soon as the design is updated, and before the application is used in production again.

So either a documented 'Installation Plan' or an automated script is needed. Ideally this plan/process is tested in pushing changes from Dev to Test, then implemented in pushing changes from Test to Production (doesn't always happen of course).

I find the whole process of updating applications increasingly more complex and I'm interested to know how others handle similar situations.