Making the Upgrade to ND6

There are many reasons why you should upgrade to Lotus Notes/Domino 6. ND6 offers improved performance, additional features for mobile users, and enhanced support for application development. ND6 also offers better large-scale deployment support. IBM says, that the vast majority of Notes/Domino R5 database applications will work with no modifications in an ND6 environment. Our experience has shown this to be primarily true.

However, there are "catches" that you must consider when making the migration, especially when considering your mission-critical database applications.

There are performance issues to consider, such as the FIELD statement that was obligatory in ND4/ND5. However, in early versions of ND6 it is not only unnecessary, but causes updates of every single document 'touched' by agents, whether or not the document meets the criterion that determines if the document should be updated. Another example is that ND6 changes how the ACL (Access Control List) is evaluated, to better conform with LDAP functionality. Due to this, any ACL entries that use wildcard entries must be re-evaluated to ensure database access is performing correctly.

There are also newly reserved LotusScript keywords in ND6, such as Lock, RemovePermanently, and Boolean. There are new LotusScript keywords in ND5 such as IsDeleted, HttpURL, and FolderReferences. All of your databases need to be checked to make sure none of these keywords are present. Lastly, there are deprecated features, such as the URL command "?OpenServer" which is no longer supported due to security issues.

Teamstudio ND6 Upgrade Filters offer a comprehensive migration and troubleshooting aid that will quickly identify the most common anomalies that exist between ND4/ND5 and ND6. Using them instead of manually checking all of your applications saves a great deal of time while preventing oversights due to human error.