Tip of the Iceberg

Category domino
My laptop and server have been upgraded to version 8 of Notes and Domino respectively.

The server installation took 4 minutes. This includes stopping the Domino service, launching the installer, navigating the installation wizard, restarting the service, and selecting "Yes" when asked if I'd like to upgrade the design of my databases. The only glitch was that when the server started back up, the HTTP task loaded while the Domino Directory was still receiving design updates. As a result, the view index for the Internet Site Configurations view was temporarily empty, so it failed over to the Web Configurations view, causing all of my domains to redirect to the default home page. I restarted the HTTP task a couple minutes later once all the design updates were complete, and everything returned to normal.

The client installation took for-ev-ver. Which I guess I can understand, since it had more to do this time than in previous upgrades. But it also bombed the first time I attempted it (my own fault, of course: every installation program warns us to close everything else before proceeding, but silly me, I had another instance of Eclipse open, plus Firefox, GIMP, and who knows what else), which had the very unpleasant side effect of uninstalling Notes... so when it finally completed successfully, I had to start from scratch with the good ol' Workspace Setup wizard. Empty Workspace, empty address book, I got nothin'. Naturally I copied the whole Notes folder to an alternate location so that I can continue to run Notes 7 in coexistence with 8, so I didn't lose any data, but it'll be a pain to reconstruct all my 7 data in 8.

IBM's been doing this for a while now (I think since version 6), for reasons I can't understand. Once upon a time, upgrading Notes would just... well, upgrade Notes. Now it uninstalls certain portions of Notes, installs new features, and then upgrades the rest. But if anything goes wrong, it "undoes" the new installation, but doesn't undo the uninstallation. So instead of being left with what you had before (which is usually the whole point of any undo operation), you're left with nothing. Very, very frustrating. Makes Timmy angry. Honestly, amongst all the little nitpicky stuff that people rag on Notes and Domino about, from an administrator standpoint, I think this just might be my biggest pet peeve with recent versions of Notes. It makes a terrible impression on users when they try to upgrade to a new version, and instead it wipes out their old installation. From now on, IBM, treat upgrades like you used to: you know, like an upgrade.

UPDATE: I uninstalled Notes 8 (which appeared to leave behind the productivity editors... with no discernible way to uninstall them from Control Panel), did some more folder copying, installed Notes 8 basic, and then reinstalled Notes 8 standard. I'm now running 7.0.2, 8 basic and 8 standard with the same baseline workspace, all on the same laptop, with no apparent ill effects. Granted, having all three open at the same time taxes my 1 GB of RAM... and has a couple odd behaviors; for example, the Mail link in the 8 standard Open area refocuses 7 and opens the mail database in that version. But who cares... this is a rather non-standard configuration, appealing only to those of us who want and/or need to run multiple versions simultaneously. In other words, geeks.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with my setup. The performance is so much better than in the beta releases (as they told us it would be). From what I can see so far, IBM has done a spectacular job on this release. I suspect the market will respond accordingly.