IBM Lotus Notes Domino 7.0.2 Beta - NOMAD
Wednesday, July 12, 2006 12:00 AM
After checking with the beta program manager if blogging about the beta for IBM Lotus Notes/Domino is allowed I'll be updating this site with some of the great new features that will be in the 7.0.2 release that is coming soon.
As usual this is beta software, features may change between the beta and the final release, indeed some features may even be dropped in the final release but I think Microsoft have the market cornered for that trick.
One feature that I have been looking forward to in this release of Lotus Notes is Nomad. Announced at Lotusphere 2006 as Project Wanda this feature allows you to install your Lotus Notes client onto a USB key. You can then put the USB key into any windows machine and the Lotus Notes client will startup with all your settings.
Setup for Nomad currently requires that you run the setup from the commandline so that you can pass in a special commandline parameter. If you have access to the beta and you have a USB key to try it on then the command line is :
setup.exe /a /v"NOMAD=1 TARGETDIR=E:\ /qb+"
This will do a silent install of the client on the USB Key that is showing up in Windows as drive E. If your USB key is a different drive letter then just change the commandline accordingly. The installation will take up about 340Mb on the USB Key. I'd guess that in the final release the install proceedure will become an option during the standard GUI install.
Once the install is done just remove the USB Key and put it back in. if your system is setup to autorun from USB Key's then the autorun program on the USB Key will start and check to see if Lotus Nomad has ever been used on the machine before, if it does not detect any prior use on the machine then it will run a small installer to setup a few entries in the registry and then start the Lotus Notes client. The initial startup of the notes client is a little slower then if it was running from the harddrive but that is probably due to the speed of my USB key and the speed of USB in general.
After that the Lotus Notes client just runs like normal. I could quit notes and move the USB key to another machine and everything worked as if it was installed locally. I also had the full notes client installed on one of the machine I put the USB key into and the Lotus Nomad install did not interfere with the installed client in any way. It was also nice to see that nomad worked perfectly when I plugged the USB key into a Windows Vista beta machine.
Nomad really does do as it was designed to do. A truly portable install of Lotus Notes that is going to be perfect for certain groups of people. I can see this being used by the IT person who runs around the office all day fixing problems, they can plug in anywhere and grab their next assignment, or maybe the consultant who needs to plug in at a customer site to grab some files from a document repository back at the office. What other uses can you think of ?