Installing Notes 8.0.2 alongside Notes 8.5

Gabriella Davis  February 16 2009 04:43:27 PM

Well we tried committing wholeheartedly to Notes 8.5 and DDE here but after a day last week when just about everyone in the office was shouting at their computer screens and the unworkably long time it took for DDE to do the simplest thing such as copying / pasting a design element in a server based db, we had to admit defeat.

What we needed was a way to have both DDE in 8.5 for new stuff and Designer 8.0.2 for existing stuff running side by side (and without separate VMs preferably).

Since the 8.5 install automatically wants to install over the top of the previous Notes client it was a challenge having them install alongside each other, especially as you want 8.5 to install 2nd so the registry entries are correct for it.  You also can't install 2 Eclipse versions of Notes alongside each other since those directories tend to be fixed to.

Here is what I ended up doing on several machines and this worked for us.  

1. Uninstalled any existing version of Notes
2. Installed 8.0.2 Notes Basic client with Designer and Admin to chosen directories (in my case d:\notes8 for programs and e:\notes8 for data)
3. Completed setup for 8.0.2 including connection to server
4. Shut down Notes
5. Renamed directories d:\notes8 to d:\notes82 and e:\notes8 to e:\notes82
6. Edited d:\notes82\notes.ini and did a search/replace to change any reference to \notes8 to \notes82
7. Relaunched Notes 8.0.2 and made sure everything worked OK
8. Installed 8.5 with DDE and Admin into the directories it automatically selects which in my case were d:\notes8 and e:\notes8
   nb: this is where it thinks the existing version of Notes is that it plans to overwrite
9. Created new shortcuts for 8.0.2 Notes, Designer and Admin as the existing shortcuts will now point to 8.5
   

Hopefully it will work for you too!

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