Hi,We are planning a migration of our Notes clients to version 6.5 and leaving (for now) all our servers on Domino 5.8. If we upgrade the mail template to the 6.5 version will all the 5.8 server tasks function correctly on these upgraded mail files? What “glitches” may we expect?
Kathy
Subject: Notes 6.5 Client with 6.5 mail template on Domino 5.8 Server
You would have some functionality that won’t be available because the server is not also 6.5. I would think you would have some possible issues with things like C&S because there would be code that the client uses that the R5 server isn’t aware of. Maybe someone can give something specific to watch out for. Are you going to upgrade the server to 6.5.x in the near future?
Subject: RE: Notes 6.5 Client with 6.5 mail template on Domino 5.8 Server
I would suggest that you do NOT upgrade the mail templates to the 6.5 mail template yet!
One thing to consider is instead of jumping from R5.0.8 to ND6.5 is that unless you cannot live without the Sametime features built into 6.5, you might think about going to ND6.0.3 first and then once you are stable, then migrate from ND6.0.3 to ND6.5. Once you get to ND6??? then you can use the Smart Upgrade feature to push out the upgraded clients to your users (but you will have to be running ND6??? on your servers to do this). From what Lotus has been quietly saying, ND6.0.3 might be more stable to upgrade to than ND6.5 (of course they will never publicly admit this).
According to everything Lotus says, Upgrade your servers first, then your notes clients and last of all your mail templates.
If you do not want to upgrade you servers, the option that I used before we converted to ND6 was to just start using the 6 notes client, but left our mail templates using the release that they were on (R5.??).
One thing that I found out is that before you upgrade your mail templates to version 6, try to be on the highest R5 version you can before you convert (I think that now it would be either R5.0.12 or R5.0.13). It will make your life easier when you convert.
Also, watch out for problems with personal folders in the mail database that the end-users have created. Make sure that they are the R5 format before you try converting them (ie: make sure the border at the top of the folder view is “Green”, not grey).
Also, one problem we ran into when converting from R5.0.10 was that we had to do a multi-step mail file conversion process using program documents. First we had to convert the mail databases using the extended mail template, then run the design function on these databases and then convert them again to the standard Mail6 mail template and then have the design task run against these databases again. This is because for many of our mail databases were missing things (like the new left-navigation panel outlines and frameset) if we converted directly to the standard Mail6 mail template.