| This article, from the Guru Guidance section of our Clippings Newsletter (the newsletter for certified Lotus Professionals and instructors) is provided by Warren Elsmore, a senior architecture consultant for BE Systems, based in the UK. He has been working with Notes and Domino since release 3 and is a regular conference speaker throughout the world, including at Lotusphere. His expertise covers Lotus Notes, Domino, Sametime, Quickr administration, and mobile devices.
NOTES SCRIPTABLE SETUPS
This article follows one I wrote in the March 2009 issue, showing you how to use the InstallShield Tuner for Lotus Notes. After that article came out, I got quite a few requests asking me to explain the scriptable setup in detail. Well, here we go!
Whenever you setup Notes, you'll be familiar with this screen:
It's the end of the Notes configuration wizard, asking you to tell Notes your name, home mail server, etc. Hopefully these are screens only your support teams will ever see, as they setup a user for the first time. You'd never ask a user to fill this in, right?
Well, either way — you can actually get Notes to bypass this setup wizard altogether. There is a technique called a scriptable setup, which will automatically answer these questions for you and setup Notes. I'll explain how this works; then we'll look at how this could be used.
The scriptable setup works by using a simple text file to answer the setup questions for you. This is typically called a config file, and each line of the file answers a specific question such as this:
Username=User Name/Acme
KeyfileName=c:\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\Data\username.id
Domino.Name=servername/Acme
Domino.Address=servername.acme.com
Domino.Port=TCPIP
Domino.Server=1
AdditionalServices=0
AdditionalServices.NetworkDial=0
Replication.Threshold=9999
Replication.Schedule=0
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Assuming that all of these variables are correct (and they must *all* be correct), then the Notes configuration wizard will use each line to answer the relevant question for you. Then all you'll see is "Notes Setup is Complete"! If any of the items are wrong or the server can't be reached, then the client will silently fail back to the traditional setup screen.
Of course, we need to be able to tell Notes where to find this text file. The best way to do this is to use the InstallShield Tuner to customize the installation for you. To point to this config file, you need to add an extra line to the default notes.ini file. This line is
To add this to your own customized installation package, create a new transform file using the instructions I gave you in the previous article. Now, navigate to the INI file section. Right-click on My Computer and select the ProgramFilesFolder entry. Now, expand this to IBM\Lotus\Notes.
Right-click that folder; select New INIfile; and type in Notes.ini. Next, expand that file; fill out the section name as "Notes"; and use the table to the right to enter your Key and Value. You should end up with a screen looking like this:
Now, here's the complex part. You need to tell the InstallShield Tuner that this file doesn't really live in the Notes directory — it lives in the right directory for the install type.
In the left pane, scroll down to the direct editor. In the center component, choose Component. Now, scroll down that list to the bottom. You should see a new entry called "CST_COMPONENT" with a value of "NOTES". Change the value from "NOTES" to "VDIR_INI" as shown below:
Finally, in the center pane select INIfile and then look for the line CST_INIFILE. Change the DirProperty value to "VDIR_INI" as you did before.
Now, you're all done. The Notes client setup wizard will read the Notes.ini file; check for the setup.txt file; and then answer all questions for you automatically!
You might be thinking at this point that it's all very well, but as each file is unique for each user, this technique is of limited use. Well, it is true — the setup.txt files do need to be user specific, but there are some techniques that we use to automate this.
Firstly, you'll notice that my example points to a setup.txt file on the H:\ drive. This is usually the users' home-network drive, so we can use one file path that is valid for all users but points to a different file for each user.
Next, we work with desktop teams. When they register new users, they would typically provide some default files in the users' home drive. We simply have the setup.txt file provisioned automatically, and get the ID management tool to save the user's ID file to his or her home drive as "user.id." That way, it's again consistent for all users.
Finally, the hard part is the Notes name. At this point, we normally have to use some sort of scripting tool, such as Microsoft Windows scripting, to manipulate the setup.txt file. But once we've worked out the process, it's plain sailing!
So, if you use this technique in conjunction with the previous technique for manipulating the install, we can usually reduce a complicated Notes setup procedure down to a few simple clicks. For many of our installs, we can actually make this so simple that we can deploy this to new users. With no support intervention at all — the user just sits down, runs Notes, and clicks OK to "Setup is complete"!
For more details on what to include in your config file, check out Technote 1112835. You'll also find a technote covering both these techniques in the knowledgebase: Technote 1258077. |