Smarter Upgrades for the remote user
Tags : Lotus Administration SmartUpgrade SuRunAs
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Smart Upgrade in Lotus Notes/Domino is a great time saver and when used in conjunction with SuRunAs you can deploy updates to your users very easily. Just yesterday I deployed the Notes 8.5 client to 16 people in my office without having visit any of the machines and without having to grant the staff any special install rights, it just works.
But there is one staff member who permanently works from a home office in another state, they connect to our network via our VPN using their home ISP. Technically we could push the Notes 8.5 client to this user but at over 500Mb for the installer files this would be a lot of traffic to push over our internal network and out our VPN to the user and I'm sure our network admin would not be very happy if I did it.
Not wanting to be killed by the network admin I had to come up with a different solution when it dawned on me that the SuRunAs package that I created just needed to be run on the users machine. All SmartUpgrade does is get the package to the machine, stops Lotus Notes, starts the SuRunAs package which in turn kicks off the embedded installer package with admin rights and then restarts Lotus Notes afterwards. The only bit I needed to do was get the package to the users machine and make it easy for them to start the upgrade.
The solution was simpler then I imagined, I took the SURunAs package that I had built and put it on a blank USB Thumb Drive and then created a simple Autorun.inf file that would start the SuRunAs package. Then I just sent it via the postal service with instruction that they need to make sure Lotus Notes was not running before putting in the USB Drive. I did a dry run on a test machine and it worked perfectly. Now I'm just waiting to hear back from the staff member to see how they got on.
So if your a Notes Admin who has to deal with remote users and you want to stay on the good side of your network admin this might be the simple solution that you need to get everybody up on Notes 8.5 in your company.
Bookmark :
Smart Upgrade in Lotus Notes/Domino is a great time saver and when used in conjunction with SuRunAs you can deploy updates to your users very easily. Just yesterday I deployed the Notes 8.5 client to 16 people in my office without having visit any of the machines and without having to grant the staff any special install rights, it just works.
But there is one staff member who permanently works from a home office in another state, they connect to our network via our VPN using their home ISP. Technically we could push the Notes 8.5 client to this user but at over 500Mb for the installer files this would be a lot of traffic to push over our internal network and out our VPN to the user and I'm sure our network admin would not be very happy if I did it.
Not wanting to be killed by the network admin I had to come up with a different solution when it dawned on me that the SuRunAs package that I created just needed to be run on the users machine. All SmartUpgrade does is get the package to the machine, stops Lotus Notes, starts the SuRunAs package which in turn kicks off the embedded installer package with admin rights and then restarts Lotus Notes afterwards. The only bit I needed to do was get the package to the users machine and make it easy for them to start the upgrade.
The solution was simpler then I imagined, I took the SURunAs package that I had built and put it on a blank USB Thumb Drive and then created a simple Autorun.inf file that would start the SuRunAs package. Then I just sent it via the postal service with instruction that they need to make sure Lotus Notes was not running before putting in the USB Drive. I did a dry run on a test machine and it worked perfectly. Now I'm just waiting to hear back from the staff member to see how they got on.
So if your a Notes Admin who has to deal with remote users and you want to stay on the good side of your network admin this might be the simple solution that you need to get everybody up on Notes 8.5 in your company.
Comments
Posted by Ben Perales At 01:27:54 AM On 02/24/2009 | - Website - |
Thanks for this post. I'm an Admin and would like to know what version did your users use prior to the 8.5 smart upgrade?
Thanks for the post on xpages as well. I'm looking forward to the completion of your xpages tutorial/post.
Regards,
Ben
Posted by Ben Perales At 01:27:32 AM On 02/24/2009 | - Website - |