Filed Under (Lotus Notes Upgrade) by Marc Champoux on November-19-2009

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

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.



Comments
Keith Brooks on November 19th, 2009 at 12:10 pm #

Awesome job! Hope this made it to LS10 as i had proposed this as a topic, but i figured an internal IBMer probably will do it.

Keith Taylor on November 19th, 2009 at 12:25 pm #

You are the man! I’ve been trying to make time to invest in getting this working. You have saved me a ton.

Andy Donaldson on November 19th, 2009 at 4:12 pm #

Seriously, this is awesome! Did you put this together for Lotusphere? Fantastic! (And thanks for the shout out ;-) )

Romel Jacinto on November 19th, 2009 at 4:57 pm #

Well done! I wish I had your guide a couple of months ago.

Marc Champoux on November 19th, 2009 at 5:29 pm #

Hi Andy,

No problemo re: “shout out” … you deserve it more than I do and I must give credit where credit is due :-)

Your presentations on the Install Shield Tuner are excellent and helped me out a lot … so “Thanks” again!

Oh and, no, this is not for Lotusphere even if presenting at LS is on my “Bucket List” … but yes … it would make a nice session.

Marc

Marc Champoux on November 19th, 2009 at 11:03 pm #

Hi Romel

Well … a couple months ago I presume you were working to deploy R8.5 … and if you ask me, that particular version was a royal-pain-in-the-lower-back-part to tune and deploy and I had lots of trouble with it so I feel your pain. Anyhow … thanks for the comments!

Marc

[...] Edit: If you check the “Response Transform” checkbox, you will generate a transform file by running the setup. More info here! [...]

Frank Docherty on November 20th, 2009 at 5:21 am #

I’ve recently put together a similar document for my own Smart Upgrade project, (In which Andy D’s InstallSheild Tuner doc helped me out immensely). My own project looks & feels a lot like yours, so I am glad to have my efforts validated by your fatastic documentation.

A truly excellent guide Marc!

Bernd Webster on November 20th, 2009 at 5:30 am #

There exist also another good HowTo:

http://www.lntoolbox.com/en/articles/sntt-customize-client-installation.html

if anybody need a combination from both ;-)

Marc Champoux on November 20th, 2009 at 9:51 am #

Hi Bernd … wow, thanks for that link … dang … I wish I had found that before … oh well. Thanks for the comment!

Mardell Zarzuela on November 24th, 2009 at 1:57 am #

hi, this is more of a question as the email i sent you bounced.

have you, in the course of making surunas work, encountered this error when upgrading via surunas: Please go to the control panel to install and configure system components.

i have customized an installer kit using installshield and packaged it as a self extracting installer (should runs setup.exe after it is extracted). i then packaged it as an surunas kit. when i test both the self-extracting kit and the surunas kit, i get the error above. when i run setup.exe manually, the upgrade goes through fine. i saw this forum and deleted the registry entries mentioned but did not help at all – http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-1545005.php.

any thoughts?

much thanks,
mardell

rajesh on December 4th, 2009 at 9:16 pm #

Hi Buddy! Thank you very much for such details presentation… let us rock 851 roll out.

maria on December 10th, 2009 at 4:59 pm #

this is an awesome find! Thank you…

[...] year, on November 19th 2009 to be more precise, I posted an entry on my blog with a nice 160 page presentation on how to deploy Lotus Notes R8.5.1 using a [...]

[...] versions of the Fix Pack 1 can be found here. A few of you have followed my two previous posts here and here on how to create a Smart Upgrade kit for the R8.5.1 client and are now wondering [...]

[...] PMRs that I had opened last year, all of which,  allowed me to create the two presentations here and here. And, once again, I received an excellent level of customer service from John [...]

mardell zarzuela on March 21st, 2010 at 10:20 pm #

hi. i tested this but it doesn’t seem to work when the user has no admin rights to the machine. i get this error:

Unable to access Lotus Notes file C:\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\notes.dll. Please close all Lotus Notes applications and click OK to retry.

if i run the surunaskit manually, it does go through with the upgrade (even when user has no admin rights to the machine), it just doesn’t work when the user only has user rights to the machine (works with power users though).

it doesn’t help that the domain i used in packaging the surunaskit is our actual domain or %computername%. the user account has admin rights to machines. please help, any advise will be appreciated.

mardell zarzuela on March 22nd, 2010 at 12:58 am #

me again, sorry. it also does not seemt o detect any upgrade kits if i indicate the destination version to be 8.5.1. any thoughts? thanks in advance.

mardell zarzuela on March 24th, 2010 at 7:33 pm #

hi, sorry for being pesky. i just received word from ibm that smartupgrade will only work if users have at admin rights (or at least a member of the power users group). were you able to test if the recommended steps in the attached presentation really works even when users do not have admin rights to their machines?

Marc Champoux on March 25th, 2010 at 9:32 pm #

Hi Mardell,

Sorry for the delay in my responses: it’s been insane at work on my side and I had to stop blogging to concentrate on getting everything fixed.

I’m surprised by your trouble(s). I tried what you asked: on a test machine that had Lotus Notes R7.0.1, I made sure that I only had User rights and I ran the smart upgrade package that I created for my users here … and it worked like a charm.

So, I’m puzzled by your trouble(s).

A few questions that might lead you to the solution:

(a) Which SURUNAsWizard.exe are you using to create your package? IF you say R8.5 … that is the problem. IF you say say R7.0.1, R7.0.2, R7.0.3, R7.0.4 or R8.5.1 then that is not the problem.
(b) In my slides, I modified each image for the SURunAsWizard.exe section to show that I’m using “wizardadm” (if I remember correctly), the password and %computername%. This is actually not the real id that I’m using. *However*, I can logon to any machine in the company with that user id because it was added with admin rights as a local user on each machine. So, try to logon to the machine with that user id, pwd and select the computer name from the list of domains … if that dosen’t work then maybe it’s simply because the local user id that you are using is missing something in it’s profile to be able to logon correctly. Ditto for your domain id that you tried.
(c) Have you checked the SU???.log that gets created on the C:\ drive? That’s how I troubleshooted with IBM that the SURunAsWizard from R8.5 had a bug (which turned out to be a regression that they fixed in 8.5.1). You might *see* the actual error that the SURunAsWizard is running into.

That’s about it off the top of my head … good luck and keep me/us posted. Don’t forget to open PMRs on this with IBM … and keep them opened until you have a satisfactory answer. I swear that I probably opened between 5 to 10 PMRs to get this all to work … and I’m still opening PMRs about SmartUpgrade since then! In fact, I just discovered an issue for R7.0.1 CCH2 clients with SmartUpgrade.

I might actually write a entry on my blog one day with the title “A PMR A Day Keep the Doctor Away…” … but it would not be a positive blog entry so I think I’ll just keep my comments to myself.

Thanks for your comments,

Marc

Andrew on April 6th, 2010 at 7:20 am #

Thanks this is great helped me out loads!

mardell zarzuela on April 19th, 2010 at 3:03 am #

hi Marc,

thank you for your reply :)

i am using this version of surunas wizard – 8.5.0.8340. i have an open PMR with IBM and was told that smartupgrade from 802/85 to 851 will only work if users’s have at least power user rights. i was also advised that this is fixed when smartupgrade is used form 851 to 852. something we cannot test yet. i will try and run a few more tests from my end and update you.

thanks!
mardell

[...] on how to get Smart Upgrade working for you. You may (or may not), have read the 1st version, the 2nd version or even the “how-to-smart-upgrade” guide for the Fix Pack 1 and, if [...]

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