Lotus Domino upgrade

See

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4120.html?Open

Lotus Notes and Domino 7 Enterprise Upgrade Best Practices

For more redbooks on Domino see

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/cgi-bin/searchsite.cgi?Query=Domino&SearchMax=250&SearchOrder=4&SearchFuzzy=FALSE

Test all your mail templates and database designs that are mission critical, along with any adaptations or modifications you or anyone might have made to standard notes databases like scheduling, address book, log, etc.

Do this carefully, make a list of all things you want to test, and do them one at a time. OPen each form, each view, in the client and in web.

If you do a dry run, even on an old PC, you'll have some idea of what to expect and you'll have a somewhat viable test environment.  :)

marilyng is correct in pointing this out.

It is mentioned in the Redbooks also, that any non-standard DB needs to be tested as part of your upgrade.

I am not too familiar with domino, I am trying to do a shortcut here. I am planning to do upgrade lotus notes 7 clients first. Is there any impact of doing this. Also if some one can assist with the upgrade for domino i would be really appreciate. Like i am looking some documents for this.

I agree that if you have any critical applications you do not want to take any shortcuts.

There is no issue with upgrading clients to R7 in general, but I would check the upgrade guide about compatability.

They will not see a lot of changes until the server and the mail templates are upgraded.

Please read the upgrade guides I mentioned in my previous comments

The problem that you may have is replication and templates.   If any ONE person has designer or better access to templates, or databases, then common templates that are normally replicated from the server replace those on the client.  For instance, if pernames.ntf is on the server, and there is a client version, then when that person replicates, if he or she has designer or better access to the templates, the client template will replicate up to the server, if not then the server template will replicate down.  The server, then, will be R5 with R7 templates, (not for mail, but for all the other common templates), or R7 with R5 templates<< this is less likely to happen since you have control over the server in R7.

The mail file templates will also migrate up or down, or across servers unless you are very careful.  Since you are new to domino, I will assume that your R5 installation is default with default ACL's and ECL's, and lots of people having manager access to their mail file and other databases.

So, I disagree with sysExpert with no issue with upgrading clients, in normal well-attended environments, there isn't. In others, you will have a mess if you don't plan and follow each and every step in the order Lotus suggests it.

I upgraded my client to notes 7 and now if i want to downgrade how do i go about doing this ? In case if the users have problem i might need to downgrade.

IN order to downgrade you would have had to have saved these files in a backup folder:

names.nsf, desktop.ndk, bookmarks.ndk, journal.nsf (if there was one) anything in local data\mail folder, including archives.  Some people have multiple address books, so you would need to copy those, too.

The problem when you UPGRADE is that these local databases are automatically upgraded to the next ods, and are integral to notes operation.  The ODS for 5 is different from the ODS for 6 & 7, so you can't just "roll back" the design unless you either have a template to roll back to, or the actual roll back databases.

When you upgrade, all the local templates and native bookmark.nsf, names.nsf, desktop.ndk are upgraded to the next version.