I mentioned in my last blog post that ManageEngine's software was one of my winners for 2013. They make great, reasonably priced software. I use DesktopCentral and OpsUtils all the time.

Anyway, DesktopCentral has deployment templates for tons of software, but not Notes. They do have a "How to" for Notes on their website, but I thought I'd post mine here as (a) it does it a bit better and (b) you almost always want to chain a Fix Pack after the install.

I'm assuming you know your way around DesktopCentral (DC) here....

First Notes, in this case 8.5.3:

The command is

\\SERVER1\install\DesktopCentralCommonApps\lotus_notes853_win_en.exe -s -a /s /v"SETMULTIUSER=1 ALLUSERS=1 PRELOADNOTES=1 /qn"


Where \\SERVER1\install\DesktopCentralCommonApps\ is your UNC path to the Notes file. I'm also doing the pre-loader that was new in 8.5.2 too.

Image:Using ManageEngine’s DesktopCentral to deploy Lotus Notes

Then I add 8.5.3 Fix Pack x (in this case 5):

The command is

\\SERVER1\install\DesktopCentralCommonApps\lotus_notes853FP5_win.exe -s -a /s /v"/qn"


Image:Using ManageEngine’s DesktopCentral to deploy Lotus Notes

Once I have both my software deployment packages added, I then create a configuration to assign to either a PC, user or group, just make sure that the FP is after the Notes install:

Image:Using ManageEngine’s DesktopCentral to deploy Lotus Notes

Voila, There you have it. This makes installing Notes on new PC's (and all the other software you see in that list) very. very easy.

FWIW I also use DC to push out a custom notes.ini file so any new users logging on are only prompted for their Notes password, not all that other crap like server, protocol and their name. At some point I need to blog that......

Darren Duke   |   November 26 2013 02:42:40 PM   |    lotus notes  desktopcentral    |  
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Comments (3)

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1 - ps       11/26/2013 5:04:27 PM

Any reason you don't use the install shield wizard to create a package? It seems more configurable to me.

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2 - Darren Duke    http://blog.darrenduke.net    11/27/2013 7:11:09 AM

@1, no real reason. Yes it is more configurable but for what I usually need the exe files are fine as is (and there are options in the exe that I didn't use to customize the install further). Now, as I outline in the last paragraph I use a custom notes.ini file and a setup file that I previously would have used the install shield for.

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3 - ps       11/27/2013 10:06:09 AM

Looking forward to your upcoming post on the custom notes.ini