Up until now my customer was using Single User Notes installations and using his own “homemade” version of multi user desktops when necessaryThey have 140,000 Notes users.
With the planned migration from Notes 7.0.2 on Windows 2000 to Notes 8.5.1 on Windows VISTA and 7 they are considering using the Notes Multiuser Installation.
I would like to get your opinion about this topic and any pros and cons you may have with regards to the two types of installation.
Do we recommend one over the other ?
If they stay with single user installation on VISTA or Windows 7 are there any limitations or known problems that they could run into ?
In my experience there are two big issues with homegrown multiuser installs. The first is that Notes is very chatty with notes.ini. If that is on a network drive – and it almost always is in this scenario – and Notes can’t get access to the notes.ini fast enough, you get crashes, hangs or timeouts, or Notes will simply lose its marbles.
The second major issue is upgrades. You have to upgrade the server then get all the updated files copied to everyone’s profiles before they can use Notes. That can be scripted to some degree, but it’s incredibly messy.
The biggest downside to switching to multiuser installs is that you need enough space on the terminal server for everyone’s Notes databases. The core templates and applications are shared among all users, which reduces used space and makes upgrades easier, but each user’s profile will contain their notes.ini, desktop, cache, bookmarks, address book, and any local replicas they make. You can redirect this to a network file server, but then you’re back in the same boat with potential timeout issues.
Subject: Re: Single versus Multiuser installations on VISTA and Windows 7
I don’t have experience with Vista or Win 7 (we use Win XP), but chose to convert to multi-user installs when we upgraded from v6.x to v8.0.2.
We did that because the single-user installation doesn’t mesh well with Windows security. With a single-user installation, all the data files go under the “C:\Program Files\xxx” directory (or the alternate you specify)–end users should not have update access to files in this part of the directory tree.
With multi-user installs, the user data is written into the user’s “profile” portion of the directory (where they should have full access) while the common code is under the protected “Program Files” area.
We had some hiccups with 8.0.2…some which come to mind include the Keyview.ini file not being properly located in multi user installs, Notes 8.0.2 required R/W access to the template files (which were located in a common location that end users do not have update access to).
I think those issues may be resolve in the 8.5.x codestream, but are worth checking on (I think they were going to make sure the keyview.ini file was properly located and make changes so templates can be R/O).
For us, the benefits are that different users can share a computer and not stomp on each other’s Notes configuration/contacts/ID files/etc., we don’t have to make special ACL rights for a Notes data directory that is located in a protected area, and user’s cannot see other users’ Notes data files.
We did a customer on multi user but have a ticket running for problems with the cleanup service (ntmulti service, cleans up too much and forces reconfigure every day after the standard 30 days delay before cleanup actually kicks in)