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| SaskPower Leverages InstallPump for Notes Upgrade & Ongoing Support |
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For immediate release:
SoftQuest Corporation
One Selleck Street
Norwalk, Ct 06855
Phone : 203-866-2126
Fax: 203-866-2127
URL www.installpump.com
SaskPower Leverages InstallPump for Notes upgrade and ongoing support
SaskPower (http://www.saskpower.com), based in Regina, Saskatchewan provides electric power to 428,000 customers over 526,600 square miles of diverse terrain in sparsely populated Saskatchewan. With over 2,800 users and 14 generating locations (over 80 sites overall), SaskPower depends on Lotus Notes for critical collaborative applications across the enterprise.
When SaskPower decided to move to the latest Notes version, several options for client deployment were evaluated. The corporation has a very diverse user base working from many sites with varying network bandwidth. A single tool that could be used both with automated software 'pushes' as well as a manual installation from CDROM was required.
Some deployment issues were as follows:
· Clients at many diverse sites, some not accessible by the deployment team, some at very low bandwidth (56k) with no file server on their local area network.
· Various versions of Microsoft Windows.
· Several hundred shared multi-user workstations with user data files residing on file servers.
· The corporation required SAP Integration components be included.
SaskPower's priority was to provide a stable and easy upgrade path for clients who have very diverse environments. The range of location types within SaskPower is remarkable. Offices range from buildings with hundreds of employees to remote generating facilities that can only be reached by airplane and everything in between.
Several deployment solutions were evaluated and tested. InstallPump proved to be the most flexible in its ability to address the very unique requirements of SaskPower.
The Implementation
The deployment team was able to create a single InstallPump package for use throughout the corporation. The package could be installed either via CDROM or pushed to the client workstation. Through use of native InstallPump functionality and heavy use of IPScript (Visual basic with some extensions), the package was able to extract all required information about the client workstation and act accordingly.
Some of the issues addressed by the package:
· The client OS version. The installation process automatically compensated for various versions of Windows. Most of the workstations had policy restrictions in place.
· If disk space on the workstation was not sufficient, a notification was created and appropriate assistance was dispatched.
· If the computer was shared, the install process automatically updated the data files on network drives and included symbolic links to required local databases.
· The SAP LSX library was also deployed.
· Ensured the executables were installed in a standard location. (C:\notes or D:\notes). If required, the executables were moved to this standard location during the install.
· Collected the name and mail file location of any users on the current machine so their mail templates can be upgraded. A text file on a central server was generated nightly and used with the convert -f domino server command.
· The success or failure of each upgrade process was fully tracked using a mail-in database.
For clients that had no file server, the install package was deployed with a CDROM containing the same package as was received by users with SMS. This package provided the same installation procedure as those for users running over high speed LAN. This produced a uniform end user experience for the rollout, with no variation in support issues.
Subsequent to the deployment, InstallPump has also been used to deploy minor version upgrades. It also provides a baseline standard installation for workstation images and the ability to easily deploy the Domino Designer client when required.
Conclusion:
With InstallPump, SaskPower was able to deploy Lotus Notes at significant cost savings over manual upgrades, especially with such a geographically scattered user population. InstallPump was truly able to address any and all technical issues encountered by SaskPower throughout the client deployment process. The upgrade project was a definite success and the cost of the upgrade process was reduced by over $20,000 CAN (versus manual upgrade).
By standardizing all client configurations across the corporation, SaskPower will be able to reduce ongoing support costs. InstallPump also provides SaskPower with an excellent position to easily move to future versions of Notes. It is very likely that SaskPower's investment in InstallPump will be leveraged again when the corporation decides to move forward with Lotus Notes. |
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