I Swear They Are Testing Me!
I read a book many, many years ago. It was one of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, Either second foundation, or foundation and earth, I forget which. (I did read them all in order straight after each other, so the actual books blurred into one story). Anyway, In this book the empire wants to find the second foundation people who they suspect of controlling everyone’s choices. So they send out one of their guys in a state of the art spaceship to go find them. The ship had a thinking brain as its computer, and what the pilot did not know was they suspected him of being one of the advanced second foundation people, and had given him a broken ship so if he was able to fly it, then it proved he was one of the people with advanced minds…
Some days I feel like that pilot. I swear they are testing me! Let me explain. I was given a new project, out the blue, with a deadline of a week. And I mean deadline since the Governor was setting it up at the customers site in exactly one week. (OK. that’s partial hindsight as I was only told the deadline at hometime the day before he was due to install the system!).
So, Whats the project?
Right, What is needed is to integrate the LDAP address book on grandstream phones with the LDAP address book on a kerio email server. Simple!
Do I have the necessary tools?
Like what?
Do I have a Grandstream phone with LDAP capability?
Err no, you don’t. There is a fellow inmate at the other side of the building who has one. You could do a bit of code work, walk over to his desk, test the phone, walk back to your room and check the code? Oh, I should mention He is one of the phone support guys, so he is on the phone all day long, so you may have to wait until he’s not using the phone before getting a quick test!
Right, Do I have an account on a kerio server so i have an address book i can use for testing?
Don’t be silly, Kerio accounts cost money, so no account to test with!
Do I at least have documention on the phones? details on how it talks to the LDAP server? format it needs responses in.
No documentation at all, No information, The only person with that knowledge is not working on this project so You’ll just have to find it all out yourself. Oh, you do have the web address of a script someone else has written. Did I mention that?
No you did not. So I have an example script that does what I need to do, so I can work from that? That’s not too bad!
Oh. You have a link to a script. I should say it does not work on any account based LDAP server so falls over if you try using it on a Keri server. And even if it did work, it does not do what you need it to do since its a script to make an xml address book to import into older phones, so a)does not work, b)Not what you want.
So. Just to summarise. I have been asked to develop a system where a phone talks directly to a kerio email server and auto populates the address book? and has the search functionability built in? I have no phone to test with or see how it works, No account with an address book, No documentation, And only a broken script that doesn’t even do what I need? Great!!!!
You forgot less than a week to finish it and get it tested!
I’ll just go out back and shoot myself now……………
CN
