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R7 Lotus Notes client with R4 / R5 Personal Address Book

Tags: Lotus Notes

Recently I was at a customer where they were having some problems with their clients.

Some of the issues reported were:
Users clients whose mailfiles were being moved from one server to another were not picking up the changes.
The customer has a desktop policy in place that (among other things) sets the Poll_Remote_Mailfile parameter in the client's Notes.ini file to allow the client to initialize replication outside of the regular 15 minute schedule when new mail arrives in the user's inbox.
Users were complaining that they only received email when the client replicated (on schedule or manually).

Further investigation showed that the clients involved all had one thing in common, they all had a personal addressbook that still had the R4 and R5 design.

Looking at those pab's kinda was a trip down memory lane


Turned out that the way the client upgrades had been deployed over the years never had resulted in design updates of the local system databases.
user data directories were located for example on a file server, or a different local partition, that included database link files for the templates that pointed to the template files in for example c:\program files\lotus\notes\data, unfortunately the users did not have sufficient access to these templates.
As a result of this the client reported that the upgrade was successfulll eventhough it did not update the local db's.

I also came across a number of local R3 mail databases - yet another blast from the past. Unfortunately these were actually old replicas of their server mailfile that they used as 'archives', not necessarily a problem until they start replicating.