I’m Serious: Seamless Mail Upgrade Needs a Progress Bar …
  

Lesson Learned: I just did an upgrade from Release R7 to R8.5.1 of a “remote site”, i.e. a location that goes across the WAN to get to their Notes server … and Seamless Mail Upgrade gave me some trouble when it comes to the “folder upgrade” part.
 

Basically speaking, if you use the “Seamless Mail Upgrade” to upgrade those user’s mail files via policy, they will get prompted to upgrade their folders after they open their mail file for the 1st time. 
 

But the problem is as follows: if you have a user with a ton of folders … it will take forever to upgrade their folders across the WAN (I’ve seen it take 3 hours on 1 particular machine) … and there is NO PROGRESS BAR. Here’s an example of what their screen looks like … interesting isn’t it? Apart from the usual “lightning bolt” in the lower left part of the screen, there is nothing that tells the user what’s going on.
     

What do most users think? They Think It FROZE!
 

Like I said, these were users going across the WAN and their “Seamless Mail folder” upgrade took a while (hours for some). Some of those employees thought that their Lotus Notes client had frozen and rebooted their machine … with the effect that they got re-prompted to upgrade their folders again (because the notes.ini variable “MailUpgradeFolder” is set to the same value as the “Setup” variable in the notes.ini once the Mail Folder upgrade is completed … and since they stopped it, it isn’t set).
  

And What’s The Solution? Communication … and an SPR
 

If you really want to use the Seamless Mail Upgrade, then the only thing you can do for now is to tell your employees that are in remote sites that the Seamless Mail Upgrade might take a while … a long while in fact.
  

If you want to turn it off, you can. But then you will have to do the mail template upgrades yourself at night (or during the day) and I’m pretty sure that you have better things to do than upgrade mail templates at night.
 

And last but not least: the SPR! Shortly after running into this, I opened a ticket with Lotus Support to request an SPR to add a progress bar to the Seamless Mail Template upgrade. The SPR number is RSSA87HKV7 and feel free to open a ticket with Lotus Support to add your name to the list of customers who need the same thing … the more people ask, the more chances of this making it to the next release.
  

Addendum…

It’s been an amazingly busy 2 months for me and I haven’t had the time to blog a lot. I hope that things will quiet down a bit in August so that I can put the finishing touches of the 4th version of the Smart Upgrade guide (I need to add a section about the Widget catalog and the Update Site).
 

Thanks for reading!
 

Marc