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Lotus Notes administrators often struggle with the problem of how to allow users to access the Lotus Notes™ client from any PC within their organization and how to backup the Lotus Notes client’s critical files that are typically stored on the user’s local hard disk drive. Wolcott Group has developed a solution that helps solve these two critical problems.

The Need
In order for a user to be able to run Lotus Notes from any PC within their organization, several critical personal files must be available to the Lotus Notes client running on the PC. These files contain the user specific information necessary to tell Lotus Notes who the user is, which databases the user accesses, how the Lotus Notes client is configured and several other parameters. In the Lotus Notes environment, the minimum files necessary are:

• bookmark.nsf

• desktop5.dsk or desktop6.ndk

• headline.nsf

• names.nsf

• notes.ini

• user.id

In order for a Lotus Notes user to be able to move from machine to machine, these files must be available to every PC the user will run the Lotus Notes client from. Administrators will often just configure Lotus Notes so that the personal data files are located on a private folder on a network server, but this solution can cause significant performance problems for the user and, in a larger organization, take up a tremendous amount of file server storage. Additionally, it will eventually become increasingly more difficult for an organization to get support for client problems when the Lotus Notes client is configured in this manner.

The ClientSync Solution
The Wolcott Group solution, ClientSync for Lotus Notes, is executed instead of the notes.exe program. ClientSync packages up the user’s critical files into a single zip file and copies them between the user’s workstation and a private directory on the server every time the user starts the Lotus Notes client and when the client exits. This allows a user to access Lotus Notes from any PC on the network and have access to their personal configuration.

When the user starts the program for the first time, the application packages up the files into a zip file then copies the file up to the network. When running Lotus Notes, ClientSync checks to see that the latest zip file is on the local drive, copies it down if necessary, unzips the files and launches the Lotus Notes client. When the Lotus Notes client exits, the zip file contents are refreshed and the file copied back to the network.

By managing the user critical files in this manner, organizations benefit because the user critical files are available on any PC the user logs on to and nightly backups of network file servers provide disaster recovery capabilities not available when the user files are stored only on the local hard drive. Since the program uses a zip file to package the files before copying them to the server, the amount of network disk space used is greatly reduced.

By default, the program packages the minimum required files as listed above; Administrators (or even users) can specify additional files (from the local Lotus Notes data directory only) to be included in the package by making simple modifications to the program’s configuration file.

Coexistence
ClientSync has been enhanced to support coexistence between Notes versions 5, 6, and 7. For organizations migrating to Notes 6 or Notes 7 over time, ClientSync can be configured to exist in multiple environments, allowing a user to operate on either platforms until the migration is complete. Once everyone is up on the new version, a simple configuration change for ClientSync causes any legacy Notes 5 or Notes 6 data to be deleted from the archive maintained by ClientSync.

Citrix Support
For organizations who have desktop and Citrix MetaFrame users who need to be able to use either environment, ClientSync can be configured to easily support operating as a roaming user plus accessing their Notes configuration via remote access while connected to a Citrix MetaFrame server. A white paper on the integrating ClientSync into a Citrix MetaFrame environment is available in the Downloads section.

To evaluate this software, register to download a free trial version.

For pricing or additional information on this and other Wolcott Group products, email us at productinfo@wolcottgroup.com. For technical questions about ClientSync contact productsupport@wolcottgroup.com.