Updating Notes client corporate welcome pages

hcl-bot · July 1, 2003, 11:30am

You can create a corporate welcome page in a bookmarks database on the server, and use policies to force users to use that home page. The problem comes when you change the design of that welcome page - that new design does not push down to users.

The solution is to replace the welcome page with a new one. For example say you call your first page “Welcome1” and you want to make some small changes. Copy all you want off the old welcome page to the clipboard. Create a new welcome page and call it "“Welcome2”. Paste the content in, and make any changes you want. Once you are satisfied, update the desktop policy to point to “Welcome2” instead of “Welcome1”.

The next time users log on they will get the new welcome page. Actually, they can even get the new welcome page without logging on. It appears as though the dynamic client configuration manager code polls the policies, but I have no idea what the polling interval is.

This approach works reliably, and will push changes down to the desktop with a minimum of “red box” crashes. However, you should be very careful when dealing with large numbers of users, because this is a very rough area of Notes.

One problem I have noticed is that there seems to be no way to prevent users from editing the corporate welcome page, even if they can’t change it. The client seems to ignore the welcome page setting where you uncheck a box to prevent users from editing the page.

I hope this saves some people the headaches we had in trying to get this to work!

Chris Doig

IDEC Pharmaceuticals

hcl-bot · July 8, 2003, 4:34pm

Subject: Updating Notes client corporate welcome pages

Hello,

Today I have implemented a corporate welcome page in a 6.0.1 environment. We roughly followed the guidelines you can find in the forum and in lotus today. But, two important issues are necessary to make it work.

first you need to clean out leftovers in the local names.nsf of every user.

-the leftovers are hidden in the view ($Policies) in the R6 design of your personal addressbook. I can imagine that an updated design of names.nsf is necessary to make it work.

-you also need to remove these documents if for any reason the current bookmark.nsf is removed after it was pushed to the client. The dcc manager is fooled by the availability of the locally stored policy documents

-the same problem occures if you previously experimented with welcome pages and didn’t manage to get it to work.

-I used the following code to clean out the stored(cached) policies in the local names.nsf. For example in a button of a mail body.

Dim s As New NotesSession

Dim db As NotesDatabase

Dim dbNames As NotesDatabase

Dim view As NotesView

Dim doc As NotesDocument

Dim tmpdoc As NotesDocument

Dim iCount%

Set db = s.CurrentDatabase

Set dbNames = s.GetDatabase(“”,“names.nsf”)

If Not dbNames Is Nothing Then

Set view = dbNames.GetView(“($Policies)”)

If Not View Is Nothing Then

Set doc = view.GetFirstDocument

While Not doc Is Nothing

Set tmpdoc = view.GetNextDocument(doc)

Call doc.Remove(True)

iCount = iCount + 1

Set doc = tmpdoc

Wend

Print “Deleted”, Cstr(iCount), “documents from the policies view.”

Else

Msgbox “Your current names.nsf is not R6 design”,16, “Error”

End If

you always have to save the policy when changes are made to the content of the welcome page (it is not necessary to change the name, just open/edit/save the policy)

-probably a tag is written to the names.nsf to store save status of the server policy, if this number equals the save status of the policy used, the locally cached policy documents are not compared with those of the server. Whether they are removed from the local names.nsf does not mather because they are not verified. I didn’t look deeper to find where it is stored or if this is correct.

The following issue is not necessary:

you do NOT have to use the database links as stated in the LDD today article “rolling out a company welcome page”

“Click the Databases tab. Currently for Release 6.0.1 and 6.0.2, you must make sure you have server database links in each field in the Databases tab, otherwise the Welcome Page won’t work.”

Bert Cresens

Xenon54