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Every Domino server version comes with its set of system templates provided by IBM, most notably pubnames.ntf and admin4.ntf (The full list of templates is in your Administrative help file). IBM's recommendation for server upgrades is to upgrade the administration server of the Domino directory first including the templates. I recently encountered a number of customers who have concerns upgrading the address book design when they have also older server versions in their network. While it is possible to prevent replication of the design, it is more trouble than worth the effort. So let me clarify a few pointers about Domino servers and Domino system templates:

• The Domino Directory template and the other system templates are designed to be fully backward compatible. Checking the technotes you will find that we recommend to have the latest maintenance release in place before upgrading to a new main version.
• Domino Servers are designed to be forward compatible. A Domino server will read only configuration values from the Domino directory it understands. New parameters are happily ignored.
• A Domino server must run with the matching version of system templates. That it does run with older template version is lucky for you, but definitely not a supported configuration. And any of the new capabilities can't be used, since you can't configure them.
• Maintenance releases are published for a reason (Go and checkout the Fix List). IBM will not backport or provide a hotfix for problems that have been addressed by a maintenance release.

So what can you do if you are not sure what version of the templates are scattered over your Domain?
The Admin help provides the list of system templates. First you need to check if you did any customization to your version. If so, separate them as described before. Then use the admin client or a little bit of script to remove them all. You don't want to mess with different touch dates, so a bit of radical surgery is in order. Install a new server somewhere (your thumb drive is a good location) to "harvest" the original template. You don't need to generate an id or configure it. Just install and copy the NTF files from the data directory. Use the admin client to add your server and admin groups, both in their native format as well as in square brackets to the ACL (using square brackets adds these groups to all databases newly created with that templates). Copy these templates to your administrative server (pros use Replication for that). Then use the admin client to drag & drop the templates to the other servers. This will replicate them over (your adminp needs to work properly, but it does doesn't it?). You might want to do that off-hours not to get in the way of regular replication activities.