The top nine things to do to get ready for Domino 5.0 (Page 3)

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The top nine things to do to get ready for Domino 5.0 (continued)

#5: Identify the mission critical applications for your organization (and those which cannot be migrated)
If all that you use Domino for is email, you can pretty much skip over this one. More likely though is that some of you run your business with Domino. To make the transition from Release 4 to Release 5 a smooth one, you need to keep your internal applications in mind and protect their integrity. All of those contact management, time and expense, human resource, project management and baseball ticket tracking applications need to be:

Tested in the Release 5 environment
Verified and/or Modified to work correctly

Can you test them all today? Probably not unless you're a Lotus Business Partner and have got an early beta of Release 5. What you can do though is compile the list of applications, line up resources, create a budget for testing and write test scripts for your testers to execute.

You might also consider creating a testing field which will display whether the application has been validated for the Release 5 environment. Create a hidden, computed for display field at the top of each form in your critical applications and give it the following value:


@if(@TextToNumber(@Version) > 147 ; 

	@Prompt([Ok] ; "Warning" ; 

	"This application has not been tested for this version of Notes. Contact Notes administration if unusual behavior is experienced or suspected.")

 ; "") ;

Be sure to replace the version number shown above, 147, with the internal version number (as displayed by @Version) of the Notes client that's currently in use in your production environment. Once the application has been successfully tested and migrated to Release 5, the field can be deleted from the forms.

#6: Get a server installed and ready for Release 5 testing and deployment
In order to test your organization's applications in the new environment and become familiar with the migration process, begin today to get funding for a test server. In large organizations this usually isn't an issue but in smaller ones it might take some arm-twisting.

Get the server purchased and installed using a setup that's identical to your production environment. Once the server is up and running, disable all connection and replication documents in that server's address book and put it in its own domain by making a non-replica copy of the Public Address Book (PAB). Finally, remove the original address book from the test server to prevent any changes made to the server and PAB from replicating into your production domain. You can now use this server for application testing.

#7: Bring everyone up to at least 4.5, preferably 4.6
This is probably the most time intensive of all the tasks that I'm going to suggest. Because this task isn't primarily server based it could also entail the most footwork. Directly from the folks at Lotus, this step is meant as a warm up and a checkpoint. If the hardware that your users have isn't ready for 4.X, then you should find out about it now. A good way to do this is to get them installed and familiar with 4.5, calendaring and scheduling, portfolios etc. That way they'll be as ready as they can for the jump to 5.0.