Lotus Notes Synchronization

Question

I'm dealing with a client who uses Lotus Notes and would like the ability to use it on several different computers as he travels around a lot. He's gone out and invested in a portable hard drive so I was wondering whether he would be able to run the program directly off that. My first thought is there might be some issues with DLL files if they're installed outside of the Lotus directory. Am I correct in thinking this might cause him some problems or should this be ok?

Answer 1

Running Lotus Notes off of a shared drive is a poor idea. Lotus notes (version 6 at least) had enough issues on its own without the added variable of a drive that can vanish. It was so bad that people created applications like zap notes. Stick to creating local mail replicas on each of the machines as outlined in this documentation.

Answer 2

There are some instructions on the web to make a portable Lotus Notes instalation:

Notes on a Stick

By IBM

I had used often older versions (<7.0) by simple copy the instalation folder. Notes has all DLL in the instalation folder.

Answer 3

A simpler solution might be to simply install the Notes client on each machine the client will be using, and then have the application NSF (or multiple NSF's) placed on the portable hard drive. If the databases are on a shared server, each instance of the Notes client can be configured to automatically replicate from the server to the external hard drive on a schedule and/or upon opening and closing of the Notes client.

If the client has a number of different Notes databases they use frequently, you can also go one step further and have the desktop.dsk file placed on the external drive, so that the desktop icons, favorites, private folders and views, etc also follow the client between machines. To do this, you need to specify the non-default location of the dsk file by adding a line to the notes.ini file such as the following: ... DESKTOP=F:\Notes\desktop.dsk ...

Answer 4

Roaming functionality on a Domino server is in place for exactly this type of scenario.

Is the user using the Lotus Notes client with a Domino Server? If so, what version of the Notes client/Domino server are being used?

If a Domino server is involved, depending on the version of the server/client and if you have access to the administrator of the server, it may be possible to enable Roaming for this user. This will replicate the user's local databases and any applications you choose to the server, and then as above you would need to install Notes on each of the computers the client wants to use Notes on.

A quick search of roaming in Lotus Notes/Domino provides several useful links and more description, but here is a technote on setting it up straight off IBM that may prove useful:

How to upgrade a non-roaming user to a Domino server roaming user

If there is not a Domino server involved, you may need to try one of the other suggestions here such as moving the .NSFs around on the portable hard drive or the portable Notes installation.

Answer 5

I would even not recommend using external HDD to store nsf files. Notes is well known for it's perfect replication mechanism and it just works without any external HDDs. Install Lotus Notes on each PC your client is using and configure the same databases to be replicated on each local installation. This will provide him with some extra security as well since if his HDD will broke one day, all other local replicas will not suffer from it.