Please submit your questions for the April 1, 2010 Notes 8.5.1.Open Mic discussion on Notes upgrade deployments and best practices.
Subject: Uninstalling Notes before upgrading yields ‘better’ results ?
Hello,
I’ve read the page in the cookbook.
It says: “uninstalling Notes before upgrading yields better results”.
I’d like to know in what ‘better’ means in this context.
Of course, if you remove everything and re-install from scratch, one will avoid a number of potential issues.
But then users will loose their settings, client preferences, destop icons, bookmarks, contacts, ID file, …
Obviously we can’t afford that.
If we uninstall, but keep those crucial client files + Notes.ini, would that still yield ‘better’ results? If so, why?
Subject: Specifically this is useful when moving from a single user to a multi user configuration…
and more generally, it is useful when you want to ‘normalize’ the Notes environment on your client desktops by removing un-necessary files, etc.
Subject: Upgrading MURunAs clients
We have been unable to push the 8.5 → 8.5.1 incremental upgrade to any of our clients. All of our clients came from 7.x and were upgraded via a Smart Upgrade package that excluded symphony components and allowed for Admin install rights on our users’ PCs.
The incremental upgrade fails with a message stating that Lotus Notes 8.5 is required. Thus the problem.
We have had to visit each PC with a full 8.5.1 client during which that installer removes 8.5 completely as part of it’s process and then lays down 8.5.1.
Taking into account that we also want to install FP1, this process will take a long time.
Does anyone have any idea what issues may have occured using the RunAs package with respect to the 8.5.1 incremental?
Finally, we attempted to build a new MURunAs based on 8.5.1 and that fails as well.
Thanks,
Doug
Subject: Cleaning up address book (connection/location documents)
Hi, during the upgrade, is there any way of cleaning up the technical part of personal address book?
Our users do not always have the standard location definitions, nor are they using the correct hostnames in the connections docs. (Some even have IP addresses.)
This we would like to clean up and standardise. Is there any way of doing that?
Thanks,
Tor
Subject: Customizing Install Package
I’m having difficulty finding information on how to customize the install package for smart upgrades.
To be specific some of the things we would like to do when we push out the new version are:
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Preferences - “Disable type-ahead for all name fields and use the Notes Basic type-ahead”
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“Do Not automatically add names to the recent Contacts view”
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We’d like to install the Single Sign On feature but have it disabled by default until we are ready to announce it.
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Pre Include Sametime server host address
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View → Advanced Menu’s set
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Use Operating Systems Default Browser
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Mark Unread Marks “Red” preference instead of Bold Black
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Setup a Default Home Welcome Page
Is there a resource we can access with information on how to make these type of changes?
Subject: answers
All notes.ini settings can be set using a Desktop policy, too.
- Preferences - “Disable type-ahead for all name fields and use the Notes Basic type-ahead”
Notes.ini setting
- “Do Not automatically add names to the recent Contacts view”
Notes.ini setting
- We’d like to install the Single Sign On feature but have it disabled by default until we are ready to announce it.
Can/must be done using a transform file
- Pre Include Sametime server host address
Plugin_customization.ini setting
- View → Advanced Menu’s set
Notes.ini setting
- Use Operating Systems Default Browser
Plugin_customization.ini setting
- Mark Unread Marks “Red” preference instead of Bold Black
Policy setting
- Setup a Default Home Welcome Page
If using corporate welcome pages, done by policy
Subject: …but it’s best to test first!
Once you set a Notes.ini setting via Policy, it cannot be removed via Policy.
Open PMR right now, but ‘beyond the scope of the feature’.
Been fighting rolling out Welcome Pages since the introduction of 8.x.
4th open PMR now.
Every change to the Policy doc seems to reset all the users’ choices, and then they complain.
Subject: Well, to be honest, in my projects I am often using different ways
Especially in upgrade project, modifying existing settings/policies is a little bit dangerous.I recommend to leave existing settings/Policies untouched and to create new 8.5.x specific settings/policies and apply them only to 8.5.x users.
When deploying clients, I preset notes.ini and plugin_customization.ini settings using transform files and plugin_customization.ini, but these would only be used for new users.
For this reason I am using a little homebrewn tool that is able to modify, add, delete (really delete!) any settings from existing notes.ini files of the user’s. Best of all, I am able to use tokens & os environment variable that will be resolved/expanded in the user context, e.g. Cache=%temp%\cache.ndk would be resolved to cache=C:\Documents and Settings\chensele\Local Settings\Temp\cache.ndk
Subject: Smartupgrade in a global organization
Hi
for upgrading Lotus Notes Clients we would like to use Smartupgrade. In our environment we have centralized mail and app servers plus a few decentralized application servers.
To reduce the WAN impact of rolling out a 500MB software packge to thousands of users we want to force users to use the “nearest” replica.
Unfortunately I can only configure ONE smartUpgrade database per server (server config doc), which means that all users which share the same mail server will have to use the same SU replica.
Is it possible to force some users from a mail server to use a different smart upgrade database than the other users from the same server would use?
Example:
We have US + AU users on the same mail server.
We want to redirect both groups to their individual local application server, where we host a replica of the smart upgrade database.
Thanks for your advise on how to do that.
Th.Hampel
Subject: from John Paganetti
If they used Network Shares versus Attaching a Kit they could use the Allowed Users & Servers: assuming they can differentiate Users in US versus Users in AU easily
Each kit would point to a local Network Share for that location.
Subject: Toolbar disappears
Testing the upgrade process from NotesR7 (single-user) to 8.5.1FP1 (multi-user) we encouter an issue regarding the toolbar.
Some of them
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disappeared
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are not available on UI
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content is not available in preferences
Behavior seems different using the basic or stantard 8.5.1 client.
Are you aware of this kind of issue during the upgrade process ?
In this case, is there any way to fix it ?
Regards,
Subject: Question regarding best practices on rolling back to a previous version in case of emergency
Hello,
A customer is interested by IBM recommendations regarding rolling back scenario.
Here is the scenario:
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Users move from machines to machines and have their data directory stored on a file server.
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The clients are upgraded from 655 to 851FP1
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The first time they start the 851 client, some local databases (desktop and bookmark for example) will be automatically converted by Notes from 655 format to 851 format.
4)In case some compatibility issue with a major application would have been undetected and the customer needs to roll back to 655 notes clients temporarily, the first time the 655 notes client will start it will try to convert back the system databases that were converted in step 3 to 855 format , back to 655 format again. Some data like the default home page in bookmarks are lost.
The customer would like to know if we have some best practice regarding this kind of emergency scenario during an upgrade. Is the restore of backup of the data directory the only supported way to roll back in case of problem during an upgrade ?
Thanks
Ben
Subject: users files on a network share
I was wondering if there is a way to upgrade the clients when they have notes.ini, id file, bookmark, desktop, names and headlines on a network share. We do this for backup purposes. All notes installs are installed as single user installs.I have tried using the smart upgrade but could not get it to work with the way we have users files on the network share.
Subject: from John Paganetti
from John Paganetti (jpaganet@us.ibm.com)
If they used Network Shares versus Attaching a Kit they could use the Allowed Users & Servers: assuming they can differentiate Users in US versus Users in AU easily
Each kit would point to a local Network Share for that location.
Subject: Using Notes Client version 8.5.1 instead of MS Outlook
Unfortunately, our e-mail servers are MS Exchange. If we prefer to use Notes Client version 8.5.1 instead of MS Outlook clients. What is the best method of integrating our notes client with MS Exchange Server. Is there any integration tools? I believe POP3 access may not be useful. Any other better alternatives?
Subject: comments
Well, you can use Notes to read your mails from an Exchange server (using POP3 / IMAP) but the most efficient resolution would be to migrate from Exchange to Domino.
The migration itself is pretty much straight forward, because you are migrating from an “email-only” environment into a rich application platform which includes mail >and< applications (all for the same investment)
Your users will benefit from full functionality of Lotus Notes mail & application services. On top of that you will save a lot of money.
If you’d like to explore this topic further, please let me know, I’ve got some material to share.
Subject: Server Migration is not Possible
As I said, unfortunately, currently there is no plan to migrate our corporate’s e-mail system from MS Exchange to Lotus Domino. We are only using domino servers as application servers.
I like notes client as mail client more than MS Outlooks. Our MS Exchange servers have not POP3 and IMAP access enabled.
Will there be any method for MS Exchange mail user’s to use lotus notes client to access their e-mail servers?
Subject: Reverting desktop file
Hi.
We re in an upgrade process from Notes R7 to Notes R8.5.1FP1.
We are looking for a process to enable a revert and encounter an issue with the desktop file
Is there a way to enable the revert for this file ? from ODS51 to ODS43 ?
“Compact -R” does not help…
Thanks.
Subject: Upgrading roaming users and introducing single sing-on
We are just about to start preparing to upgrade our clients from 6.5.4 to 8.5.1. We have 3.700 users who are configured as Notes roaming users. I have a couple of questions:
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I have read several places that it is recommended to unroam and reenable roaming for users who are already configured as roaming users. I really hope that is not necessary? If that is really what is recommend please let us know why, and if there is any other solution (like maybe waiting for the 8.5.2 release). The process of unroaming and reenabling roaming for 3.700 users is an extremely scary scenario and very time consuming!
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We would like to use some kind of single sign-on, but we can’t use Shared Login as we use Citrix and save the ID file in the personal address book. That leaves us with Notes Single Logon as in earlier releases. We would like to introduce idvault in order to archive easier administration (reset of passwords), but unfortunately idvault is not supported with Notes Single Logon. That means that we are stuck with the old password recovery. The questions are:
a) Will IDvault work with Notes Single Login (through it is not supported)?
b) Are you going to support NSL with IDvault in the near future?
c) With our configuration, is there any hope that we will be able to use IDvault and Shared Logon in the future?