Once again, I have to ask if I’ve gone mad (and once again answer = probably)
 

I’ve decided to share this blog post with you today because I’m seeing a very strange behaviour in regards to Smart Upgrade and the number that I’ve specified in the “Limit concurrent downloads” in the server configuration document.
 

The behaviour that I see is that when people press the “Don’t Update Now” button when prompted … the “cancelled” upgrade appears to counts toward the number set in the “Limit concurrent downloads”.
 

Here’s What I See …
 

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words and … well, maybe a graph will help people understand what I’m seeing.
 

The graph below basically shows the current number that I’ve set in the “Limit concurrent downloads” (30) in the server configuration document vs. the people who upgraded, the number of failed upgrade and the number of people who clicked on “Don’t Update Now”.
 

So, What’s The Problem?
 

At this point, you have the right to ask “so, what’s the big deal?” It’s quite simple…
 

Since I’m deploying Lotus Notes R8.5.1 in a fairly large office (300+ employees), IF the first 30 people that log into Lotus Notes in the morning get prompted to upgrade and click on “Don’t Update Now” … then nobody else gets prompted to upgrade!
 

As you can see in the graph above, as time goes by … lots of people click on “Don’t Update Now” … which limits the number of other employees who get prompted to upgrade.
 

In other words: if  my 30 “workaholic early birds” get into the office at 7 AM and click on ”Don’t Update Now” then the rest of the employees don’t get prompted to upgrade when they log in at 8 AM, 9 AM or 10 AM (or whenever they drag themselves into the office).
 

It’s currently affecting me because I’m getting support calls from people who read my weekly tips-and-tricks emails that I sent to the company and *who want to upgrade desperately* (to use all the new features that I discuss) but who never get prompted.
 

And each time that this happens, I check in the Smart Upgrade Tracking Results database and I see that 30 people clicked on the “Don’t Upgrade Now” button at the start of the work day. I usually end up telling them “Click on the File → Tools → Notes Smart Upgrade menu to get the prompt to upgrade…” and they’re usually quite happy after that … but this “feature” is annoying me.
 

A PMR A Day Keeps The Doctor Away … Not In This Case …
 

I did what I always do when something puzzles me: I opened a PMR. Unfortunately for me, I’m got nowhere with the PMR that I opened so … I’m blogging about this to ask …
 

Has anybody else seen this behaviour? Please leave a comment if you did … (it will help me tell Lotus that I’m not alone and I’ll feel a tiny bit less crazy).
 

Conclusion
 

Smart Upgrade is amazing … once you figure out how to configure it properly. It does have it’s intricacies and I think that this problem is just one of those that I accidentally stumbled upon…
 

Anyhow … as usual … Thanks for reading!
 

Marc

Another Cryptic Error Message?
 

Well, in my own opinion, I’d qualify this one as “semi cryptic”. And if you ask me, the message should read as something like this:
 

“Smart Upgrade has detected in your notes.ini that you are using a version of Lotus Notes that includes the Designer and/or Administrator client. You cannot downgrade to a Lotus Notes-only installation via Smart Upgrade. Please verify your current installation and the InstallType= line in your Notes.ini before re-trying.” 
 

I can wish right? Well, sometimes I wish so hard that I open SPRs for suggestions … so the SPR for this is #RSSA87UQVT.
 

So, let’s look at why this happens or why this might happen a tiny bit closer before the solution.
 

Why does this happen?
 

Well, there are a few possibilities that I’ve seen so far … maybe there are more ways to get this error but this is what I encountered in my own environment.
 

Reason #1: Lotus Notes with the Designer and/or the Administrator client is installed on the machine. This causes the InstallType= line in the notes.ini to be set to “2″ instead of “6″. So when you try to ”upgrade” someone with the setup files for the “Lotus Notes” client only, it fails.
 

Reason #2: You had, a long time ago, installed Lotus Notes with the Designer and/or the Administrator client on your old machine. Flash forward a few years, and you’ve changed machines a few times and, due to the amazing backwards compatibility of Lotus Notes, you’ve always moved your notes.ini and your databases when you changed machine. So your notes.ini still has the InstallType= line set to “2″ instead of “6″. So, even if you try to upgrade with the “Lotus Notes” client only files, it looks at the notes.ini and still sees that the InstallType= is set to “2″ and stops right there.
 

The Solution – Official Response from Lotus
 

If you search for Technotes, you’ll find stumble on Technote #1271989 ​(here is a link). That Technote basically says “un-install your Notes and re-install it”.
 

The Solution(s) If You Really Only Have the Lotus Notes Client Installed (no Designer or Administrator clients)
 

So, let’s imagine that you’ve checked the employee’s machine and you confirm that *only* the Lotus Notes client is installed. What can you do? Well you can try the following…
 

Solution #1 – Change the Notes.ini Manually …
 

01. [Click] on File → Exit to close Lotus Notes.

02. [Click] on Start → Program Files → Accessories → Windows Explorer.

03. In the Windows Explorer left pane, navigate to the Lotus Notes Program Directory (for example, C:\Notes or C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\)

04. Find the notes.ini file and [Double Click] on it to open it with Notepad.

05. Search the notes.ini file to find if there is a line that starts with “InstallType=” (it’s usually near the top anyway).

06. Change the value of that variable from “2″ to “6″.

07. [Click] on File → Save to save your changes to the notes.ini

08. [Click] on File → Close to close the notes.ini file.

09. Re-Open Lotus Notes R8.5.1
 

Solution #2 – Send Them A Button …
 

Don’t feel like explaining to an employee what to change and how to change it? Well, simply download the LotusScript code below and create a button with that code and mail it to the user. It will do the modification in the notes.ini for you and let the employee know that it’s done.
 

Conclusion
 

Well, like I said, maybe the message will be changed in the future … in the meantime, keep the 3 solutions above in mind if you run into this.
 

Thanks for reading!
 

Marc

Ever Get a Recurring Nightmare?
 

I don’t. Which, I hope, makes me a normal person (as normal as Canadian can be anyway).  However, I do have a recurring error that creeps up in about 5 to 10% of the upgrades that we’ve done so far [shameless plug time: yes, I'm using the instructions from my own blog post here to upgrade the employees using Smart Upgrade].
 

That error that comes up from time-to-time, like a recurring nightmare, is as follows: ”The file is damaged, obsolete or intended for a different version of Lotus Notes“. This error shows up on the 1st time that the employee starts his shiny new Lotus Notes R8.5.1 FP1 client.
 

Here’s a screen shot of the error (not that it really matters … but I’m a visual learner).
 

I *really really really* wish Lotus would change that error message to say WHICH file is damaged. But that might be too much to ask? Is it?
 

So, in the meantime … here’s something that fixed the problem when it showed up …
 

The Solution
 

Truth be told, this isn’t a “pretty solution”. It’s a bit long and it could probably be shortened up” but I decided to “play safe” by running a bunch of commands on local to be 99.9% sure that the files on the local are clean for the next start up. So … ready? Here we go …
 

01. [Click] on Start → Program Files → Accessories → Command Prompt
02. [Type] C: and press <Enter> on the keyboard.
03. [Type] CD\Notes\Data and [Press] <ENTER> on the keyboard.
04. [Type] ..\nfixup.exe -F
05. [Type] the Lotus Notes password when prompted and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
06. Wait for the fixup task to finish.
07. [Type] ..\nupdall.exe -R
08. [Type] the Lotus Notes password when prompted and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
09. Wait for the updall task to finish.
10. [Type] ..\ncompact.exe -c -i
11. [Type] the Lotus Notes password when prompted and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
12. Wait for the compaction to finish.
13. [Type] DEL CACHE.NDK and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
14. [Type] DEL LOG.NSF and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
15. [Type] DEL PERWEB.NSF and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
16. [Type] DEL DESKTOP8.NDK and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
17. [Type] EXIT and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard to close the Command Prompt window.
18. Start Lotus Notes R8.5.1 and verify if the error is still there. Continue to the next possible solution if the error reappears.
19. Once Lotus Notes is started, go to the Workspace.
20. [Right Click] on the Workspace and in the menu that appears [Click] on Properties.
21. [Click] on the 2nd tab of the In the small Info box that appears.
22. [Click] on the Compact button of the 2nd tab of the small Info Box.
23. Wait for the compaction to finish.
24. [Open] the Personal Address Book of the employee.
25. Close and Re-Open Lotus Notes R8.5.1 and verify if the error is still there. Continue to the next steps if the error reappears.
26. Verify that the Personal Address Book of the employee has the version 8 look & feel.
27. IF it does not have the version 8 look & feel, close the Personal Address Book then continue with these steps.
28. Open the Workspace.
29. [Click] once on the icon for the employee’s Personal Address Book.
30. [Click] on File → Application → Replace Design.
31. In the screen that appears, verify that the title of the box that appear says “Replace Application Design of names.nsf” or “Replace Application Design of contacts.nsf. If not verify your selection in step 29.
32. If you have the right database selected, [Scroll Down] the list of templates and [Click] on “Personal Address book”.
33. [Click] on “Replace”.
34. [Click] on “Yes” when warned about the “design changes”.
35. Monitor the progress in the status bar.
36. When the Replace Design is completed, [Open] the Personal Address Book of the employee.
37. Once again, verify that the Personal Address Book of the employee has the version 8 look & feel (it should be fine now).
38. Close Lotus Notes and Re-Open it to see if the error should be gone.
 

In the end, if you’ve done all this and the error is still there … you might need to backup and rename the DESKTOP6.NDK to see if that’s the culprit. I had to do that only once and it resolved the error. It created another one however: I had to rebuild the workspace of that particular employee.
 

Conclusion
 

Well, like I wrote, I wish Lotus would change that error message to say which file is damaged … so I might SPR it for a future release.
 

Also, if someone else had documented this somewhere else … sorry, I didn’t do a tourough Google search before writing this post.
 

As usual, thanks for reading!
 

Marc

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

Dear Readers …
  

Welcome to the 3rd edition of The New Domino Admin presentation 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 you did read them, thank you for stopping by and reading those long, lengthy, tedious posts.
  

If there’s one thing has never ceased to amaze me about those blog posts, its the number of comments and questions that are added to each post. I humbly thank you again for your nice comments, your questions and I ask you to forgive me if I don’t respond back fast enough. After all, I still need to do my day job. Keep in mind that there are a bunch of people at Lotus Support that are [hopefully very well] paid to answer questions day-in, day-out and that they’d love to hear from you if you have any questions related to Smart Upgrade.
  

So, let’s get this show on the road? What’s new in Version 3 of this presentation you may ask? Simply put: in the now 207 pages long presentation, you will find instructions on how to bundle the R8.5.1 client AND the Fix Pack 3 so that both installations are done one-after-the-other during the upgrade process in one shot instead of upgrading to R851, starting Notes once and then Smart Upgrading to Fix Pack 3.
  

How it’s Done
  

You might have read about how do “daisy-chain” Fix Packs on the blog post mentioned above or even on this nice post by Mr. Serdar Basegmez (thank you for the nice comment btw Mr. Basegmez).
  

However, some people asked me “Is there a way to bundle the R8.5.1 AND the Fix Pack 1 (or 2 or 3) into 1 incredibly large package?”. At first I tried many many things and I couldn’t get it done. However, thanks for a small comment by Mr. John Pagliani of Lotus on my blog where he said he could help me out, I figured that what I was trying wasn’t impossible. And because of his comment (thank you!), I figured the solution to my problem shortly after.
  

The trick is … to use a batch file. But real trick is to have the batch file create an environment variable of the path where the SURunAs files are extracted and simply refer to that variable later when calling the setup.exe for the R8.5.1 installer and then right after when calling the setup for the Fix Pack installer.
  

So, the presentation has been updated to include new sections in which we download and prepare the Fix Pack 3 for packaging and also a new section in which we create the batch file that will do the work for us.
  

So, What Does This Presentation Cover?
  

Basically, this 207 pages presentation improves on the previous versions and 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 – Adding the Fix Pack to the kit.
   
• Part 5 – Creating the Batch File that will do the setup.
   
• Part 6 – Using SURunAsWizard to create a single-file executable.
   
• Part 7 – Uploading the package and updating the policies.
   
• Part 8 – A deployment example.
   
• Part 9 – Fixing the Mail Template to prevent the error during Seamless Mail Upgrade.
   

One Last Thing … Once again: a few “Thank You”!
  

Always thank those that help you …
  

And if you’ve checked the previous versions of the presentation, you’ll see that I say “thanks” to Andy Donaldson, Michael Willard, Andrew Lapidas, Andy Liew, Jean-Paul Mehanna, John St. Germain, Tony Trout and John Pagliani for their help. Their combined blog posts,  answers to my support tickets, and suggestions are the reason why this presentation exist.
  

So, thanks again to all those who helped me make this happen!
  

Without Further Due … Here’s the 3rd Version of 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 Fix Pack 3 more quickly and more efficiently).
  

  
Click on the icon above to download the presentation.
  

I hope you enjoy it.
  

What’s Coming Next?
  

In the months to come, I hope to have a bit of spare time to create the 4th version of the presentation in which I intend to cover the following:
  

• Setting Up the Widget Catalog and deploying 1 widget via policy after the upgrade. (not really required but nice to get it over with).
    
• Setting up the Update Site and pushing 1 Sidebar Plug-In to R8.5.1 clients via policy after the upgrade.
    

That’s It, That’s All Folks!
   

Once again, thanks for reading … I hope this helps someone, somewhere …
  

Marc

Another Day, Another PMR and Another SPR …
  

This is going to be a quick post. Nothing fancy but it might help someone out there. To begin with, let’s assume that you have used my two previous presentations here and here to get Smart Upgrade up and running in your own environment. Now let’s also assume that you have a mixture of R7.0.1, R7.0.1 CCH2, R7.0.2, R7.0.3 and even a few R7.0.4 clients out in your environment.
   

Everything is working fine to Smart Upgrade all the clients *except* the R7.0.1 CCH2 clients … why is that?  Even if they click on File -> Tools -> Notes Smart Upgrade, they get the dreaded “No Matching Kits” message box.
   

First and Foremost, what’s the CCH2?
   

Simply put, it’s the Client Cumulative Hot Fix Pack 2 for Lotus Notes R7.0.1. “Back In The Days”, we had to deploy that CCH2 to some machines who used a particular database because it contained a fix for a weird DBLookup issue. We had no choice back then …
   

So, What’s The Work Around?
   

The Work Around is quite simple: edit your Desktop Policy Settings document to remove the mention of the FP1 in the “Deploy Version” field. In effect, the “Deploy Version” field will need to only contain “Release R8.5.1″ and your R7.0.1 CCH2 clients will get prompted to upgrade.
   

But This Creates Another Problem … and Here Comes Another Work Around!
       

Now that you have removed the mention of the “FP1″ from the “Deploy Version” field … guess what? Nobody gets prompted to upgrade to Fix Pack 1 (or Fix Pack2 if you have already packaged it … the steps are exactly the same as the one I wrote about before). So, every couple days, you need to re-edit your Desktop Policy to put back the “Deploy Version” to “Release 8.5.1 FP1″ so that people who got upgraded to R8.5.1 also get prompted to install the Fix Pack 1. And you have to “flip-flop” back and forth until all your CCH2 clients are upgraded. Not. My. Idea. Of. Fun.
   

What’s for Desert? An SPR of Course!
  

None of my posts would be complete without the mention of an SPR … it’s almost an habit nowadays (a bad one if I may add that). But anyhow, I have opened a PMR about this with Lotus Support and this turns out to be a known bug with the CCH2 and has been documented in SPR #BJGY83KQGR. The Lotus Support Rep that I worked with provided me was extremely good but he was very careful not to mention if this would be addressed and/or if it will ever be fixed at all (probably not since it applies to an “old” version).
   

Parting Words…
  

For me, in my company, I’m going to be “flip flopping” the policy back and forth a few times … because I have about 400 R7.0.1 CCH2 clients. Hopefully, I’m one of the few companies “out-there” who’ve had to install this and who’s facing this now. But if that’s your case … I feel your pain.
  

Thank for reading!
  

Marc

My New Addiction…
   

Right out of the gate, I have to confess to something: ever since I got Smart Upgrade to work correctly, I got addicted to watching the views in the Smart Upgrade Tracking Results database.  There is something oddly satisfying in watching the results appear in the database now that it just plain works. I really can’t explain it. So while I can’t say this thing is a “sport”, I have to admit that I’m watching it often … anyhow, I thought I’d share my new addiction with you.
  

You Mentionned Something About a Fix Pack I Believe?
     

Oh yes and that’s why I’m writing about it! As you all know, the Lotus Notes & Domino 8.5.1 Fix Pack 1 was released about a week ago. The technote with the links to the various 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 “How can I package an deploy the R8.5.1 Fix Pack 1 the same way?”. Well, here’s how I did it.
  

The Joys of Smart Upgrading a Fix Pack
 

Truth be told, Smart Upgrading a Fix Pack is a walk in the park. It’s a piece of cake. It’s … well, you get the point. Smart Upgrading a standard client is the equivalent of undergoing root canal without anesthesia in an airplane flying in heavy turbulence in my own personal opinion but Smart Upgrading a Fix Pack is so much easier that it dosen’t even compare. Smart Upgrading a Fix Pack is like getting a chair massage in the Certification Lounge at Lotusphere when your back really really really hurts from walking around with a heavy backpack all day … maybe the guys from the special forces can do that all day long without breaking a sweat but I sure can’t … and oh … wait I just remembered there were no chair massages this year!
  

Right out of the gate, you won’t need to use the Install Shield Tuner! So, with this simple fact, you just saved yourself from a few more gray hairs. And the command line? Simple too! So, how do you Smart Upgrade a Fix Pack? Well, download the presentation to view the steps. It’s fairly quick and easy and it just plain works.
    

How to Smart Upgrade the Lotus Notes R8.5.1 Fix Pack 1
  

Writing down step-by-step instructions in this blog post would take 10 pages so, instead of boring you to death with a super long post, I offer you my usual step-by-step slides to get it done. So simply click on the icon below to download the 82 page step-by-step PowerPoint presentation with the instructions:
  

Parting Words …
  

Please note that another blogger, Mr. Mick Moignard, posted a nice entry on his blog about an error message that said “Error encountered when installing Notes Hotfix Core component” when he tried to install the Fix Pack. If you ever run into this error, make sure to read his blog post on how to get around it.
  

Thanks for reading & have fun Smart Upgrading!
  

Marc
  

I hope this helps you!
 

Marc

Summary
 

Last 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 combination of SmartUpgrade, the Install Shield Tuner, SURunAsWizard and Policies.  The post was quite popular and I thank every one of you who visited my blog and/or who commented.
 

However, one of the problems with the last presentation was that, if you followed the steps religiously, the Lotus Notes R8.5.1 client would not login the employee into Sametime on the 1st startup. In fact, to get it to work automatically, you had to open the sidebar and click on the Login button at least once. Fortunately for me, last month, Tony Trout of Lotus Support sent me 1 more line that should have added into the plugin_customization.ini file to get the notes client.
 

And what line needs to be added? Simply this one: 

com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.login/autologin=true

So, after updating the file, recreating the package and testing it, I can safely say that this line works. So, what did I do next? Well, I updated the presentation for your enjoyment. You will find the download link after the “Thank You’s”.
 

Once again … a few “Thank You”!
 

Just like on my lst blog post, before you get to the download part, I would like to say Thank You (again) to a few people who have made this presentation possible …
 

• Andy Donaldson and his blog 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 of Lotus support for his help in figuring out how to setup the Sametime Community in the plugin_customization file.
   
• And most importantly #1, 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).
   
• And most importantly #2, Tony Trout of Lotus Support, for not giving up on me and my questions in regards to the Sametime Community config in the plugin_customization file and keeping me constantly updated on his research.
     

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 again?
 

Basically, this 161 page presentation still covers the following (only 3 pages were updated):
 

• 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 Updated 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 on the icon above to download the presentation
 

I hope you enjoy it.
 

Addendum
 

On November 17th 2009, 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 will help someone out there …?
 

PS: I’m leaving for Lotusphere on Saturday so I might not be able to respond to comments for the next week.

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.