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Using InstallPump, Foseco Completes Large-scale Notes Migration Project For immediate release: SoftQuest Corporation One Selleck Street Suite 510 Norwalk, Ct 06855 Phone : 203-866-2126 Fax: 203-866-2127 URL www.installpump.com Using InstallPump, Foseco completes large-scale Notes migration project About Foseco Foseco (http://www.foseco.com/) has been associated with the metallurgical industry for more than 50 years and has operations in over 30 countries. Firmly established as a leading supplier of metallurgical chemicals to the higher quality segments of the foundry industry worldwide, Foseco, the 'Foundry Services Co', plays a key role in the automotive, construction and engineering casting markets as well as in environmental issues. About H2Systems H2Systems (http://www.h2systems.com/), located in the United Kingdom, is an authorized distributor of InstallPump and RemoteAgent, providing product sales, support, and consulting services. The Challenge One of Europe's leading private equity providers, Cinven, purchased Foseco from BP in September 2001. At the time, the company's IT services were centralised at BP's Burmah Castrol site in Swindon, but this facility was only available for a six month period, by which deadline a new Lotus Notes environment based at Foseco's in Tamworth would have to be implemented. The Foseco team had the task of coordinating the migration of around 1500 users and 40+ servers in 25 countries around the globe to a new Lotus Notes infrastructure. In particular, the 'burmahcastrol' domain name would have to be replaced with a 'foseco' domain name. After exploring various scenarios and possibilities, it was determined that Foseco would have to create a domain from scratch and reconfigure all clients and servers. Various factors contributed to this decision, one of which was that the Foseco business was mainly running R4.6x Domino servers thereby limiting the upgrade possibilities using the Domino administrator process. After investigating several possible solutions for reconfiguring the clients, it was decided that InstallPump would be versatile enough to perform the client changes that were required. These included changes to the desktop.dsk, switching the id, and changing replicator page entries. All of this configuration data could then be shipped out as part of a pre-configured "Migration Pack". In detail, the migration scripts would have to cover: The creation and set-up of a new Domino server environment The creation/population of a new Notes Name and Address Book (NAB) The registration of all users into the system The unattended configuration of the Notes client including: (a) location and connection documents; (b) bookmark and workspace definitions; and, (c) the replicator page set-up The upgrade of all Lotus Notes clients to run a minimum release level of Notes The Solution Working with the IT team at Foseco, H2 Systems International used InstallPump for Notes to deliver scripts that would automatically configure the remote installation of Lotus Notes applications to the majority of users on the Foseco network. H2 Systems also provided InstallPump scripting services to configure the Domino servers. In particular, the solution included: 1. An InstallPump script to deliver the following changes on the previously set up Domino servers: To set up 1,400 users in the PAB; the entries were set up and registered from data provided in an Excel spreadsheet To create 600 groups from this data, and allocate the users into groups To rename the ACL settings on all servers To rename the users in the Reader/Author fields on all servers To make the selective modifications to the mail file delegations The Name and Address Book update was written to the UK central hub server for Notes to manage onward replication. InstallPump was also used to update the ACL settings on three other regional servers, in North America, Germany, and India. 2. A set of InstallPump scripts which allowed configuration of the Notes clients on those user systems connected to the global Foseco network. These scripts performed the following tasks: Back up the names.nsf, notes.id, notes.ini, desktop.dsk, and bookmarks.nsf files Editing the location and connection documents to identify new server(s) Editing the Bookmark and Workspace to identify new server(s) Editing necessary Replicator page entries Renaming the ACL's Renaming the Reader/Author fields Forcing a password change when user initially opens up the new Notes client Over a period of just 3 months, all Notes servers were migrated to the new Foseco domain over successive weekend periods. The UK sites were the first to be migrated, with a further 22 international sites to be upgraded using the InstallPump approach. After the client scripts had been written and tested, the InstallPump application and pre-configured scripts were sent to the Foseco sites around the globe, where the local administrator could edit them as required. Considering potential language issues and the limited amount of exposure the sites had previously had to InstallPump, there were very few operational requests on how to use the software. The Foseco team commented that InstallPump proved to be a very reliable and easy to use product that worked across the many different language versions and various releases of operating systems within its business. In summary, H2 Systems supplied a solution with the capabilities to both set up the Domino server environment and deliver an unattended installation of the Notes clients. This involved the delivery of the InstallPump software together with suitably configured script files and an associated training program for the Notes Administrator. In addition, the tested InstallPump scripts also delivered sufficient data from the client systems to a central management point where the failures were analysed and corrected. The final migration was completed two months in advance of the deadline date. Return on Investment With InstallPump, Foseco was able to fully automate their entire Notes deployment process. All the requirements outlined at the start of the project were accomplished, and the need to send an IT engineer to each target machine was eliminated. Based on just this one use of InstallPump, Foseco has already identified a significant overall savings in both expenses and time spent, with a corresponding increase in productivity. Laurence Hanson, the project manager for the migration, commented "Using InstallPump allowed us to develop a standard migration approach for each Notes roll out. Consequently, the end user was able to manage the migration by referring to the standard set of installation instructions we provided with H2 Systems. Then, any result in the migration process that did not conform as predicted could then be reported back to the support team to fix. This standard approach also allowed later migrations to benefit from the experience gained in the earlier ones. At Foseco, we were confident that H2 Systems had the right skills to assist us with the migration - and InstallPump also proved to be a reliable and a robust tool for us. However, we also saw InstallPump as a strategic purchase. While it easily met our initial requirements for the migration I believe that it will also prove to be an invaluable tool in future Notes related projects." Foseco has subsequently used InstallPump to upgrade their all Notes clients. After a successful upgrade in Tamworth, they shipped the tested scripts to the rest of the globe. They commented that using the product to write an upgrade script was self-explanatory and the scripts delivered consistently configured desktops.