One Reason To Upgrade to Notes 7
Remember my Four Reasons To Upgrade to Domino 7.0.2? Well, that was for the server. Here's my one reason to upgrade your client to Notes 7.
Note: The image below is animated - one frame every five seconds.
Yes, that damned infernal message has driven me to near madness and I've finally succumbed. This week I will upgrade my Notes clients to version 7.
Is this as easy as running the setup and over-riding the current Notes 6 install? Should I backup my desktop.dsk file first? The last thing I want to do is lose my workspace!
Skip to the 
You can subscribe to an individual
Why not just do a clean install and copy the items that you need into the new directory, including desktop.dsk? This way you can run 6 & 7 ...
I had no problems upgrading from 6.5.x to 7 but that was quite some time ago... been running 8 beta pretty much since it's release. I can send over some databases if you want to see those messages in 7 as well :P
I'd backup first .. but that said I've run upgrades from 6 to 7 several times and never seen a problem (at least, not that I can remember).
@Mike - I tried several times but could never get a satisfactory install of Notes 7 beside Notes 6 (Notes 7 is very insistent at installing over the current version) and despite registry changes etc it never quite worked.
Just go to Notes 7 .... I always get a feeling of it being an much more stable better performing client anyway.
Or, if you still have customers running earlier releases, you can have them installed in different folders. I had installed 4, 5, 6 and 7 all together for while. Now I have just Notes 7 and 8
I used the USB install mode on my hard drive to install Notes 7.02 in parallel to Notes 6. Only disadvantage: you have to hack a bit to get Designer and Admin running: {Link}
I did the same last week: Getting rid of 6.5, and completely moved to 7.02, even for 6.5 customers.
No problems encountered: runs very smooth.
You will discover some more niceties...
I always make a quick copy of the data directory and then upgrade in place. You could then always uninstall, clear that directory, reinstall the old version and put your data back with no issue. If I run a week or so fine, I get rid of the temporary copy and move ahead.
Always make a backup. I upgraded from 6.5 to 7 and did not loose my workspace.
However there is one problem that can cause a Denial of Service to your email with Notes 7 that has been fixed with 7.0.2 HF534. There are some external MIME messages that cause the non-fixed Notes client to crash. This is not a problem with 6.5 when reading the same exact message. They did fix it in the Hot Fix.
The other problem I and others at work have is that when opening a database the Notes client will go completely white (the Notes client window is white, menus and text are gone) and will not be responsive for what seems to be a very long time (30 seconds or more).
Like Luis, I have my clients set up in different folders. Currently running 6.5 and 7 without problem. Only trouble arises when both are running and doing a lot of LS compiling - 7 will hang sometimes or crash... though I'm running it in RPC debug mode so that might have something to do with it.
@Scott - shouldn't need registry changes, just some slight of hand. There are a couple of different ways to do it, but the simple end is install first client, move to new folder (backing up ini to be sure), install next client, move to new folder, etc. Since the more recent installers are hard set on where they put things, you can use this method to sort of step out of the way and let it do it's thing and still get what you want.
Wait two weeks and upgrade to 8 :-)
And as to multiple clients - start using VmWare - one image per client.
The client that you use most stays installed in the "outer" OS.
I think that I vote in favour of doing a clean install and then moving what you need. It's just like when moving in the real world - you'll be amazed how much you can throw out.
I develop in Designer 7 on Domino 7 servers for Clients on 6.0.3 since 2 years without a problem.
Notes 7 client is way better then 6. It is faster, I really enjoy autosave and lots of other small things
Hi Jake,
My company went to 7.02 on the client first and we all saved our desktop files as a precaution. Nice, clean install and have not looked back since. We then went for 7.02 server upgrade, again nice and clean but we did experience regular server restart notifications. Every fortnight or so the server would re-boot itself at varying times of the day. This behaviour has lessened over the past 6 months and the server has not done this for nearly 2 months now. (fingers and other extremities firmly crossed) On the plus side the reboot happens very quickly that most of the time our 100+ online customer base barely noticed it at all !!
Regards
Al
As with all versions of domino since I can remember - you can install the client on anothe computer - then just copy and paste the entire Lotus/Notes directory onto your main computer et voila.
Then you just create separate shortcuts to the R7 designer/admin stuff but you still have the R6 stuff to fall back on if you really need to.
The only thing I do hate is that you can never run two versions of notes at the same time. If you start your R7 designer you cannot load the R6 designer at the same time - bizarrly enough even though the shortcut is to the R6 shortcut the open R7 cleint comes to focus.
*shrugs*
Gerald, you can actually run the setup.exe from the full (admin/designer) installer and not have to "hack" the install... :)
Also, I recently posted a tip on Nomad here:
{Link}
If you normally run Notes 6, you can run Nomad 7 (or 8) by running nlnotes.exe. Nomad is a great way to have multiple versions of Notes. You can install nomad from 8.0 installer, but you DO have to hack it a bit because the autorun stuff doesn't work but you can just open nlnotes.exe directly.
I close my eyes, hope for the best and hit setup.exe.
Worked fine for me, for ten years from 4x to 8.
Workspace survives - gave me a hell of a shock when bookmarks was introduced though...Was that 5, or 6?
Mark, I assume you're already aware of this, but once you have both clients - 6 and 7 - running in parallel (using the respective nlnotes.exe file), hitting the appropriate bookmark icon should start the coresponding version of designer.
At least it always did it for me (with 4.6, 5, 6.5 and 7 installed on the same machine). I used an installation procedure similar to what Jerry described, though.