Not So Smart Upgrade?

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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I have been reading the postings here regarding the new ‘Notes Smart Upgrade’. While it’s entirely possible I’m missing something this new feature seems completely pointless!

The concept is great, only problem is you are still depending on the users to acknowledge all the prompts of a regular installation… so how is this different from providing a user with a list of installation instructions and crossing your fingers?

Silent install? Ya right! There are laptops, terminal servers, office pcs, home pcs and shared pcs with various configurations (i.e. Single Client Logon Service) - not to mention the fact that users have no idea when the silent update is complete, shy of staring at the HD light or watching Task Manager.

Why can’t Lotus / IBM sees what’s installed, and upgrade the required files?

Why is there an option to restart Notes, when it shuts it down prior to the upgrade?

Not only was it a pain to get it working because it requires the word ‘Release’ in front of the version number - yet not stated anywhere, but then you get it working, it looks like things are going well and BAM, user input is required.

Pardon the rant but this is painfully frustrating. I am a big fan of Lotus products, but you folks are killing me. We are a 100+ person company recently bought out by a massive corporation that uses Exchange. Given how difficult you are making this, what are my arguments to my seniors convincing them to keep Lotus products?

I read another posting here stating that incremental installers are no longer incremental, rather a complete install (stated by a LDD rep himself). Seems to me incremental installers would work with this Smart Upgrade feature.

When I first read about ‘Smart Upgrade’ I made the mistake of assuming it was ‘Smart’ and would eliminate the problems of client upgrades. Seems to me all you did was add a link to a network executable… Thanks!

Roaming users has been long awaited around here for the reason of multiple pcs, I wonder what problems we’ll face there. Of course, I need to get all the clients and servers up to 6.0.1 first. Ha!

Seriously, if someone has some input on this, something maybe I did miss (which I said is entirely possible), please share. I have been through the admin help, notes.net, and elsewhere.

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Subject: Not So Smart Upgrade?

I cannot see how you can blame IBM / Lotus for a failing in a MICROSOFT technology. They are leveraging the MicroSoft Installer to provide the updates - hell, half the time i can’t get my Microsoft products updated cleanly with their own technology. Try getting Project 2002 and Visio 2002 to install cleanly, and correctly with a silent MSI install !

So far, i’ve managed to get 100 of my users to update - all they have to do is hit Next four times, then finish. Whilst a silent upgrade would be nice - it’s not the end of the world without it.

Whilst they have dropped the ball with the documentation - i’m as pissed as anyone about wasting a day before realising that you had to use Release 6.0, they’ve done a great job on ND6. If you want real frustration, try upgrading Outlook clients !

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Subject: Not So Smart Upgrade?

Thanks for the responses folks.

Doug, I couldn’t agree with you more on the improvements of ND6. I guess my expectations were a little higher for Smart Upgrade based on other improvements. My point was having the user hit Next four times wasn’t very ‘smart’. In fact it’s no different from previous upgrades. It’s nice that you have what sounds to be a stock environment; we on the other hand have users with various preferences within the Notes client, and other users with the Designer client. I was just hoping SMART Upgrades could see what’s installed and react accordingly, regardless of the packaging used. I appreciate your response, and no, I don’t think I’d like to deal with Outlook! =)

Brian, thanks for your thoughts - we will certainly look at possibilities in the AD / GPO arena.

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Subject: Not So Smart Upgrade?

Or course, i can now eat humble pie - it seems that other folks have managed to get it working through the simple trick of renaming the file setup.exe and passing it the correct parameters

http://www.lotus.com/ldd/nd6forum.nsf/DateAllThreadedweb/9524566015C705B685256CD00056AAC2

THe 6.0.1 clients don’t need this trick !

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Subject: RE: Not So Smart Upgrade?

We have silent installs working flawlesly via smartupgrade. We re-wrapped the msi into an excecutable that passes the paramaters (for silent install) when the file is unpacked and ran. This has worked out great.

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Subject: Not So Smart Upgrade?

I agree, the concept is great, but the user input requirement needs some refinement.

Without knowing your environment, I’ll share some of the things we did in ours to “refine” the update process.

Please ignore the poor English.

In our environment 1000 users, laptops, desktops, terminal servers, etc, etc, to have users do the install or “watch the hd light” is not an option.

We ended up dumping the smart upgrade option entirely, and created “canned” installs inside of Active Directory Group policy, software install sets with MST response files.

All desktops are R6 multi user and I use the Policy functions inside notes for my different OU’s to create replicas , specific security settings , etc, etc… This partially covers the setup process.

I only do updates once a new package has been sent via CD and then I repackage it into AD GPO and perform the update that way.

It seems to work out okay for our environment. Hope this gives you an alternative to work with. Like you, I agree the “smart upgrade” is a good idea, but needs some refinement. Maybe this could be a future “enhancement request”