Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Unique Replication Roadblock

While upgrading a server(R5)and migrating the users to the new (R7) Lotus Domino server we have run into a situation which I have been tangling with for years.

In this case it is not a upgrade overnight solution it is phased in over a month or 2 for 500+ users due to client controlos and change management procedures.

Have I mentioned how much I hate change management procedures?! Another prcoess created because of Microsoft failures in applications. (I had to fit this in, I recognize the need for these procedures, really I do!)

So when we replicate the user's mail file from R5 to R7 the template and changes get written over and revert back to R5 instead of the R7 ones.

We know we can set the ACL to Editor on the server name and that will stop design changes from replicating, but then it also prevents some tasks and agents from running on the mail file which is also not a good idea in this case.

We can go ionto advanced settings on replication and select or deselect replicate designs, forms etc. but we do not want to do it on a per user basis either.

Thought we could try an agent to run against the users selected and uncheck the design elements but our findings, and Lotus support(Thanks Clint and Paul for trying) agreed, there is no way to do this in an exposed method or via API manner.

Sounds like a job for Ideajam.net

We need policies for advanced replication settings or a programmatic way to adress them.

3 comments:

  1. I dont understand, cant you just disable the design task on the R5 server?

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  2. Jesper, Design will not negate the replications. It will stop the design task from running at night and reformatting the databases.
    Which is an idea, except Design must run because of other applications on the server.

    Possibly this could work if we can schedule design to run only on \data but not \data\mail.

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  3. I dont think you can do that:(. But if you dont have a lot of databases in the root directory you could run design from a program document instead.

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