In one of my previous entries I mentioned that I was looking into getting Lotus Notes to roam properly on Windows machines. The built in roaming stuff in Notes is not the best when your users like to use the WorkSpace so we had to do it the old way and point the Lotus Notes client to use a network based data directory and set the location of the NOTES.INI file on the shortcut’s command line.

This seems to work perfectly for the shortcuts that you have access to but in Windows XP there is a new start menu format that allows you to have default entries for E-Mail and Internet Browser. Setting the notes.ini for these is not so easy but with enough hacking about in the registry I found out where the information for these are stored and I now have it working…

This should be the easiest thing in the world….

Install the Multi-User version of the Lotus Notes ND6 client so that it puts the users personal NSF files in their Microsoft Windows NT profile. Then enable roaming NT profiles so that the user can log onto any machine in the company, have their NT profile downloaded to the machine and use Lotus Notes…

So what’s the problem….

Well, Lotus have decided that they should create the users personal notes data directory in the ‘Local Settings’ sub directory of their NT profile. By default this directory doesn’t get copied up to the users roaming NT profile so their setting won’t follow them around and when they log onto another machine they have to go through the whole Notes Client setup routine again.

So how do you fix this little problem. Well after pulling out all my hair, writing scripts to copy files back and forth between the local settings directory and their user directory on the network I discovered that there is a small Windows registry setting that allows you to set which directories in the NT profile are excluded from the copy process. By removing the Local Settings directory from the registry key the file copy to the server when you log out and copy down to the machine when you log in.

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon

“ExcludeProfileDirs” = “Local Settings;Temporary Internet Files;History;Temp”

The only thing to watch out for is that by removing this directory from the key you may increase the size of the users NT profile and thus cause logins and logouts to be a bit longer. There are also some other benefits of doing this, more of the users settings are copied to the profile and it gives the user a richer roaming experience.