pmooney.net

1 - I had a customer last year who brought us on to resolve some issues that IBM couldn't get fixed for them. One was that "The symptoms of this problem are the red screen fatal error, a message that reads "a delayed write failure, " and a message that indicates that the "specified network is no longer available." Notes must be forcibly shut down when these errors occur and restarted." Right when I got onsite, the admin did a switch ID to show me something else and I saw that she chose a file on her H: drive. I told her that I believe we found the cause of this issue.... Sure enough, the ID files were stored in the home drives for many users.

2 - I have seen this in some places, I also worked at a company once that had this set up for some of our users. A real pain in the neck when upgrading clients as it makes it a real logistical nightmare. Those few places I have seen doing this have since changed to single user install.
I know NOBODY who uses roaming users.

3 - I have seen this in some places, I also worked at a company once that had this set up for some of our users. A real pain in the neck when upgrading clients as it makes it a real logistical nightmare. Those few places I have seen doing this have since changed to single user install.
<br />I know NOBODY who uses roaming users.

4 - Still see it and also we moved some sites to roaming some time ago

5 - Still see it and also we moved some sites to roaming some time ago

6 - We don't use roaming Windows profiles but we do use Notes roaming profiles which means no Standard until 8.5

Maybe Lotus could come up with a different word to describe Notes roaming profile because it's very confusing distinguishing them from Windows profiles... I mean hey, Databases got changed to Applications right?

7 - We still use variations of this technique, because of two issues. The current roaming process is difficult for normal users to understand and it is slow as users switch from one desk to another. Multiuser is also a problem because you need to consider which workstations each user will be using and set them up on each. I wish there was a simple way that is supported to let users access the whole notes experience from any workstation as they roam around our network. Think Lotusphere kisok

8 - We use also a network based Lotus Notes Installation. We use a part from out ADS Login Script to create a empty notes.ini (with path to the datafolder, programmfolder, ...) on drive N (for Notes) if there doesn´t exist a notes.ini... I use a multiuserinstallation for this. The reason is, that the templates lay on the local workstation and not on drive N. It is also possible to update Lotus Notes with this system. Simply update the Lotus Notes client via ADS. Oh, and I modifized the regestry so that the entry points to Drive N. Not the option in the explorer called "send via email" work also . If somebody is interested in this solution I can write a short handout. Just drop me a short eMail via my website .

9 - Most of my german customers do it that way, especially the bigger sites.
The most impressive customer I know is Deutsche Bahn. They have homedrive based datadirectories since Release 3, which was introduced by Lotus Consulting by the way. They have around 65.000 to 70.000 seats.
So yes, you are right it is not supported and it never was. You can imagine what it means to switch the partly automated Client deployment and the support of such a system to IBM roaming. They can roam nicely, they can resolve id Issues automated, by rolling back the id file out of a managed pool into the homedrive and they can do it since release 4! And they dont consume a huge amount of bandwith in the roaming case.

A similar situation with big citrix sites. I have a customer who has a terminalserverfarm containing about 40 Servers. If you logon, the system brings you to the server which has the most resources available...of course with a datadirectory on the file server.

I like the IBM roaming which is available in Release 7, but i guess network drive based datadirectories will last for long...

We have some variations of that in place. So some customers synchronize their local notesdata to a homedrive during the login, so yes... its not replication.

10 - oh... I totally forgot my personal favourite notesclient deployment szenario which supports backend backup of personal notesdata and roaming.

Working with third party Client Management products.

They enable you to roam the data you need during the notesclient start with a very small footprint, and you can react on some interesting factors like (citrix client, laptop, workstation, network conditions) to decide what to do in the different cases.

11 - We use roaming heavily in our organization and the user.id files are stored on users network home directory. We had to use this network drive for storing the user.id files as we had a lot of issuing synchronizing the notes passwords with the AD password using the password power tool. We started using this about a year back and we had no issues so far. Almost all the notes clients are multi user clients.

12 - most of the time the network installation is still used, but you can mitigate it with the ini file, ie move the cache local and such to try and get some speed increase, but have seen the network instalation used on a notebook, so that the user had to vpn in to get anything to work, man that ran like a dog

13 - We store the users address book and id files in the Windows Roaming profile. Roaming profiles are stored on a backed up network server. This way they are working locally, but the files are still backed up. We manipulate the notes.ini file to point to %USERPROFILE% This also offers flexibility with laptops. We have scripts that the users run that copy the files from their network share and let the Notes client run as it would on the desktop. Its a bit cumbersome as the administrator, but we do not have to deal with network issues when the client is running locally.

14 - Where I work they currently use a slightly ropey method of manually copying the id, names and bookmark files down from a server when the users log in to Windows (we don't have roaming profiles or home drives - welcome to 1986). When they log out the files are copied back up providing a basic form of romaing. Problem is that if Notes starts before the files are copied down you get corrupt files. About 10% of our SD calls are regarding this. And I'm heading up Prob Man to fix it. Nice