By David Gewirtz
A few years ago, I ran an article about installing the Notes 6 client. I honestly didn't expect it to be particularly popular, because most of our readers were pretty high-level IT folks. But, suprisingly, I got a relatively large number of "thank you" letters about the article. Apparently, our readers were using the article to save time. It turns out they were sending the article's URL to their users and telling their users to follow the steps, rather than making a "house call" for each new Notes install. So, now that Notes 7 is here, it's time to update the article for the new release.
Now, I know that all of you sophisticated developers and administrators out there don't need this. However, if you've got a moderately handy user who needs to do a Notes install, save yourself some time and point him or her to this article. That way, you can avoid doing yet another install yourself and you'll be able to help empower your users.
Running the installer
First, of course, you'll need the Notes 7 install disk. Pop the CD-ROM into your drive, and the installer should automatically load, as you can see in Figure A.
FIGURE A
When the installer launches, you have some options. (click for larger image)
If your installer doesn't automatically load, navigate to your My Computer icon, double click the Notes CD icon, and run the Setup program.
You'll notice you have a bunch of options you can choose from when installing the client. By default, the installer tells you to install Notes, but you can also navigate the disk to see what else is available. There are some fonts, a sample Web service application, and some dictionaries. If you've done this install before with Notes 6.5, you might remember that you could also install Designer and Administrator from the same CD-ROM. This is no longer the case. There's now a separate CD-ROM for Designer and Administrator.
Once you choose your options, the actual installer program will begin running, as shown in Figure B. Just click Next.
FIGURE B
Just click Next. (click for larger image)
Figure C shows the license agreement screen.
FIGURE C
There's a lot to read here. (click for larger image)
I'm kind of a license agreement geek. Although nearly all license agreements are draconian, there's usually something interesting, creepy, or fun in each of them. IBM's Notes agreement is no exception. I found two clauses that gave me a bit of enjoyment. The first was the money-back guarantee: