Smarter Upgrades for the remote user

Smart Upgrade in Lotus Notes/Domino is
a great time saver and when used in conjunction with SuRunAs you can deploy
updates to your users very easily. Just yesterday I deployed the Notes
8.5 client to 16 people in my office without having visit any of the machines
and without having to grant the staff any special install rights, it just
works.

But there is one staff member who permanently
works from a home office in another state, they connect to our network
via our VPN using their home ISP. Technically we could push the Notes 8.5
client to this user but at over 500Mb for the installer files this would
be a lot of traffic to push over our internal network and out our VPN to
the user and I’m sure our network admin would not be very happy if I did
it.

Not wanting to be killed by the network
admin I had to come up with a different solution when it dawned on me that
the SuRunAs package that I created just needed to be run on the users machine.
All SmartUpgrade does is get the package to the machine, stops Lotus Notes,
starts the SuRunAs package which in turn kicks off the embedded installer
package with admin rights and then restarts Lotus Notes afterwards. The
only bit I needed to do was get the package to the users machine and make
it easy for them to start the upgrade.

The solution was simpler then I imagined,
I took the SURunAs package that I had built and put it on a blank USB Thumb
Drive and then created a simple Autorun.inf file that would start the SuRunAs
package. Then I just sent it via the postal service with instruction that
they need to make sure Lotus Notes was not running before putting in the
USB Drive. I did a dry run on a test machine and it worked perfectly. Now
I’m just waiting to hear back from the staff member to see how they got
on.

So if your a Notes Admin who has to
deal with remote users and you want to stay on the good side of your network
admin this might be the simple solution that you need to get everybody
up on Notes 8.5 in your company.