Lotus Notes now contains native support for multi-user client installations in version 6. But there is no (as yet) clear direction on how to convert existing Notes clients to this configuration. Many organizations simply uninstall their existing Notes clients and install the new multi-user option. This would typically require an administrator to visit each machine to ensure that valuable data files are not lost. In organizations of any size, the associated cost issues can be staggering.

For more information on the benefits of Lotus Notes new roaming user and multi-user configurations, check the Lotus Domino Administrator help file for the topic "Sharing a computer with other users".

Automating multi-user upgrades
So how can automated upgrades to the multi-user installation be performed on these users' machines? There are a two paths that an administrator can follow: performing the process manually, or utilizing third party tools.

Since the default Lotus Notes installer does not contain any option to upgrade a standard Notes client to a multi-user client, the preferred method for manually performing this upgrade is to:

1. Create a backup of the user's local data directory and Notes.INI file.
2. Completely uninstall the current Notes installation.
3. Install the target version of Notes with the multi-user option selected.
4. Launch the Notes client as the current user and complete the configuration.
5. Close the Notes client.
6. Copy the data directory to the user's new data directory (off of the "Documents and Settings" path).
7. If you are replacing the new Notes.INI with the user's existing Notes.INI document, copy the old INI to the data directory and update any path references which point to the old data directory, and add the "SharedDataDirectory" setting (points to the "All Users" Notes data directory).

As you can see, this process can be quite time consuming, and since there are so many steps the possibility of introducing an error is great. Third party tools offer the option of automating this process, though many of these can be difficult to configure.