Notes Client Upgrade Considerations

Anthony Holmes  10 May 2010 11:46:46 AM

This is a high level overview of Notes Client upgrade considerations and options.

Installing Notes Clients

The setup program with Lotus Notes performs a number of tasks: as well as laying down the necessary files, it checks for previous installations of Notes and Registry entries to ensure you aren't left with a 'mixed' installation. If a Notes.ini file is present, obsolete settings may be removed. Although some people publish workarounds to have different releases of Notes installed on the same PC, this should not be done as part of a standard installation. The setup program is designed to protect you against the instability caused by mixed releases and inappropriate configuration settings. Therefore, your default position should be to 'install' Notes, rather than copying images to a PC some other way.

Ways of initiating Setup

There are a number of ways of initiating a Notes installation. These are different ways of initiating a proper installation. All of these methods are supported:

• Launching setup.exe
• Using Smartupgrade
• Upgrade by Mail Deployment and
• Running of the Notes installation by a software deployment and packaging systems like Tivoli Provisioning Manager, Microsoft SMS.

Each of these methods will install either the standard installation package, or a customised version of that package.

Install Shield

The Notes setup client is an installation package created using InstallShield.

It is possible to re-configure the Notes installation for a number of reasons:

• To provide responses to installation questions so that users aren't prompted
• To pre-select which features will and won't be installed
• To change aspects of the installation from the default: for example, to use different directories
• To deploy different files, or to change the default notes.ini
• To pre-configure information, for example, details of the Update site to be used in this organisation
• To install additional plug-ins etc.

This reconfiguration is done using the InstallShield tuner for Lotus Notes. This is a version of InstallShield's more general packaging software, locked so that it can re-configure Notes installations but cannot be used for other software. The Installshield Tuner for Lotus Notes can be obtained from IBM Passport Advantage. An excellent description of Notes client package customisation can be found here:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/Notes_Installation_Package_Customization 


PC Images

Rather than running Setup every time you get a new PC, you may want to simply lay down an entire PC image.

For normal Notes installations (installing on PCs that are already deployed) laying down an image of the Notes directories alone would not be supported. The Setup program must be given its opportunity to make decisions about which Registry entries need to be added and deleted, and to check for older versions of Notes.

On a brand new PC that is to serve as the image for a wide deployment of PCs to an organisation, you might - with care - create an image that is reused on other new PCs. With the base PC, you would install the Operating System and other programs. You would then install Notes: either using the standard Setup, or one that you had tuned. Note: If you install Notes manually, you should keep a record of the installation choices you made so that you can repeat the process if a new image later needs to be created for new hardware or a new Operating System release. If you use a tuned installation, you should keep that tuned package for later use if needed.

Important Note: You must ONLY install Notes. You must NOT start Notes on the base PC. If you start Notes on the Base PC, it will start to configure Notes. This means that it will create files like the Personal Address Book (names.nsf) and Bookmarks. Some of these files will be Notes databases that will have a replica ID. If you have personal files in an environment with the same replica ID it can cause the inappropriate merging and loss of data. For example, if two users have Personal Address Books with unrelated (personal) contacts, they may merge if they ever replicate or appear on the same server. This might happen if you ever replicated a Personal Address Book to a server (to make it available to other people, for backup reasons, or as part of Roaming or Blackberry configuration). Even if you don't currently intend to do this, it is risky to have personal configuration databases in an environment with common replica IDs.

In summary: If you are creating a Base PC, that will be used as an image for deploying PCs, run the installation of Notes but do not start Notes. When you come to deploy copies of the Base PC to users, you can then start Notes on the copies and place ID files etc. onto the PCs that are being deployed. This could be done manually by copying files, with batch scripts specific to your environment or by using features like the ID Vault.

Other tools

One way of bypassing the running of the Notes setup tool entirely might be to use a tool that manages changes to the Registry. For example:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/regshot/

This tool is designed to capture changes in registry entries. Note that there might be dangers in (for example) taking a snapshot of the Registry for an existing Notes 6 installation, installing Notes 8.5, and then assuming you have captured all the changes that you might need for any PC in your environment being upgraded from Notes 6 to Notes 8.5. Some of your Notes 6 PCs may have registry entries that weren't present in your test upgrade samples. (For example, some PCs may have had Notes 6 Designer installed, or may have additional entries present because they were upgraded from Notes 5, while others had Notes 6 as the first version installed on the PC.)

If you bypass the running of the Notes 8.5 setup program by other means, you need to be very careful to ensure that you get a proper installation. Generally it is safer if Setup is run on the PC, or if it was properly used to create a base image.

Managing Future Upgrades

Teams managing Notes client upgrades often focus on the goal of deploying a single release of Notes (for example: "this project is deploying Notes 8.5.1FP1"), and don't spend a relatively small amount of time agreeing on how to manage subsequent upgrades (for example, Notes 8.5.2). The ideal time to consider this is while the upgrade is being planned and deployed. All the relevant parties are engaged and thinking about Notes during the upgrade. It need not be expensive or difficult to provide subsequent upgrades. It simply needs to be decided who will do it and how they will do it.

The teams that look after packaging are often focused on the Operating System, and don't have any responsibility for items that may be fixed or usability improvements that come with updates to the Notes client code. Sometimes the Notes/Domino team aren't members of the packaging group. There should either be a simple way that the Notes/Domino team can engage the packaging groups when necessary, or, the Notes/Domino team should be given the ability to manage the deployment of Notes software themselves using the Smartupgrade facility that is able to deploy Notes client upgrades as part of a 'business as usual' activity.

Notes client upgrades need not be expensive and infrequent. They should be routine and happen as often as needed.

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