Summary

I have been working with Lotus Support for a couple weeks (months actually) on getting Smart Upgrade to work in my company. At first, I was trying with the R8.5 client and we had tons of issues (including the discovery of a regression in the SURunAsWizard.exe in R8.5 which I blogged about here). While working with Lotus Support, R8.5.1 was released so I switched gears and started working toward deploying that new version … and truth be told, it was so much easier to tune R8.5.1 than R8.5.

While working with the folks of Lotus Support, I promised one of them that I’d create a step-by-step presentation of every single step it took me to get it to work. So … here it is for your enjoyment.

But first … a few “Thank You”!

Before you get to the download part, I would like to say Thank you to a few people who have made this presentation possible …

• Andy Donaldson and his blogs posts here and here on how to use the Install Shield Tuner. His blog posts helped me a lot!

• Michael Willard, Andrew Lapidas and Andy Liew of Lotus Support for working with me and discovering the bug in the SURunAsWizard.

• Jean-Paul Mehanna and Tony Trout of Lotus support for their help in figuring out how to setup the Sametime Community in the plugin_customization file.

• And most importantly, John St. Germain of Lotus Support, for all his help and discovering that using “-d” in the SURunAsWizard caused most of the issues I was running into (it’s an undocumented gotcha).

As you can see, it was a team effort … so I have good reasons to say “Thank You” to all these folks … but that’s the power of the Notes community … lots of people all working together and sharing information.

So … What does the Presentation cover?

Basically, this 160 page presentation covers the following:

• Part 1 – Creating the Smart Upgrade Kits and Smart Upgrade Tracking database.

• Part 2 – Setting up your computer to create and tune the kit.

• Part 3 – Creating the “Kit” and Tuning it with the Install Shield Tuner.

• Part 4 – Using SURunAsWizard to create a single-file executable.

• Part 5 – Uploading the package and updating the policies.

• Part 6 – A deployment example.

And Now … The Presentation … 

Well, simply click on the file below to download it to your computer … and enjoy. Hopefully it will help you and your company deploy Lotus Notes R8.5.1 more quickly and more efficiently.

Click here to download the presentation

Addendum

Last Friday, Mr. Ed Brill posted on his blog a post with links to 2 new wikis that had just been published which contains similar information. I felt kinda ackward because I had been working on this presentation for a while now (John St. Germain can attest to it since I had sent him draft copies of the presentation). However, since I had spent so much time on it, I didn’t want to let it all go to waste and I decided to finish it and post it. Maybe it it will help someone out there …?

I hope you enjoy it.

PS: I am leaving for vacations on Friday somewhere where my cell phone won’t work and where there’s no internet so I won’t be able to respond to comments for the next 2 weeks.