This article is about the resulting project, partly from the point of view of what we were looking for, but more to show the code and to explain how you might want to modify it for use in your environment. If you want a copy of the code, contact me via email, and I'll send it to you. Just remember that the usual disclaimers apply to your use of the code; it's entirely at your own risk. Make a backup of the directory book first, or run on a copy (the code doesn't change directory entries, but we should always use best practice, hey?).

What were the problems we wanted to solve?
The first problem we wanted to solve is the real user's identity. A person's Notes name is kept in two places. One is the master copy, found in the Notes ID file, and the other is in the Person document in the directory. There's nothing in Notes that forces a synchronization of these entries. My name, on my Notes ID file, is Mick Moignard/Group/Unipart, or more correctly, the proper canonical form CN=Mick Moignard/OU=Group/O=Unipart. This should appear as the first entry in the Fullname field in the person record. If it doesn't, there are a variety of things in Notes and companion products that don't work properly.

What my code does, as we will see, is assume that the name in the Owner field--you find this on the Administration tab--actually does represent the name as found on the ID file. This Owner field is set when the person's registration is done, and if AdminP is working properly, is updated if the person's name changes. Notes also expects that the common name part of the ID file is the same as the separate values of firstname, middleinital, and lastname. For a variety of reasons, at this site, they weren't.

There are also company standards on the value for shortname and a new standard for the Internet address. The shortname standard really stemmed from the V4 days when shortname could be used as one of the two options for forming Internet addresses. With R5 came the ability to specify any Internet address value for each person and to have Domino look it up on inbound and outbound mail. What we wanted to do here was detect short names that didn't match the first initial, last name rule as well as those Internet addresses that didn't match company standards. We wanted to get a handle on how big these problems were, so that we could decided how to solve them.