Upgrading Notes client to V12 on Terminal Server

I worked with my friend and lady geek, Marianna Tomasatti, at a customer to perform an upgrade of the Notes client to V12.0.2 FP1 on Terminal Server Windows 2019 Datacenter (multi-user installation) because the Notes clients had some issues.

Since the previous version was V9, in the user’s home directory W: there was a folder named IBM, and the path to the client data directory was W:\IBM\Notes\Data.

V12 creates a directory named W:\HCL\Notes\Data when installing for the first time so what we expected was that launching the Notes client, the setup wizard started.

To our surprise, the client started normally and not in setup mode! We double checked and found that the notes.ini in the old W:\IBM\Notes\Data was used and the directory W:\HCL\Notes\Data was not created.

We could simply not understand why this behavior… so I put forward the wild idea “maybe the client tries to find a notes.ini in any directory and if it finds it, it uses that one”. Being like-minded, Marianna did not laugh at me, because she is a very experienced Notes administrator and has seen many strange things in her career so even the wildest of the ideas could have some possibility to work.

With the help of the customer Terminal Server administrator, we checked what files the client was trying to open and we found out that it tries, in order

W:\HCL\Notes\Data\notes.ini
W:\IBM\Notes\Data\notes.ini
W:\Lotus\Notes\Data\notes.ini

And if it finds the notes.ini file in there, uses it.

This makes sense, since the naming of the default directories of Notes/Domino have changed over time from Lotus to IBM and now to HCL, but we did not know that the client tried to find the notes.ini in those directories!

The solution was then to rename W:\IBM to W:\IBM_username because the client would not check a directory with that name.

In fact, after the rename, we launched the Notes client again and the setup wizard started.