So yesterday we had the release of Upgrade Pack 1 sprung on us by Ed Brill. Overall this “A Good Thing” but there is quite a lot of detail which was missing from the announcement.
This was a problem for Warren and I as we’re presenting a session at Lotusphere on the Deployment and Management of XPages, so a swift bit of research and slide rewriting has been in order this morning.
Essentially the Upgrade Pack is a new version of the Extension Library just installed in yet another way. If you’re running the Extension Library in 8.5.3 already then you’ll need to uninstall it from your Domino Designer and from your server before installing the Upgrade Pack (this may be harder than you imagine, it took me several tries on one machine and simply refused to work on another so I had to delete the Workspace directory!)
I haven’t had time to fully test my applications, but from my initial testing it appears that an application written using the November 19th version of Extension Library will work just fine running on an Upgrade Pack 1 server so from the developer’s point of view this whole process is relatively painless. You just need to decide in your organisation whether you’re going to run with the Extension Library or the Upgrade Pack. I’m sure over the coming weeks and months the pros and cons of either approach will become clear, but for the moment if you want a simple life then Upgrade Pack seems to be the way to go.
What is less clear is how this affects the singnificant admin in your life. I’ll let Warren cover this in more detail in our session at Lotusphere, but at the moment it seems as though it’s going to be quite difficult to deploy and manage the Upgrade Pack in a large or complex environment so bear that in mind when making decisions.
And for reference the part number on the IBM site is CI5HUEN and the version number (thanks to Warren for this) is 8.5.3.20111208-0717 (i.e. significantly later than the current version of the ExtLib on OpenNTF).
Matt,
For large companies with all the bureaucracy and requirements and the "feel safe" need by management the fact that the Upgrade Pack from IBM is a much easier sell to install. At a LARGE company getting the rights to install Extension Libraries from OpenNTF is almost impossible because there is no vendor support there. Large companies like to know there is support.
@John,
I don't disagree, but from what Warren's said the management of the UP1 installation process is much harder in a large or complex environment than the ExtLib from OpenNTF, so it's going to be a decision of taking the unsupported code which can be easily managed vs the supported code which takes more effort to look after.
Matt
Matt, as a Developer I like to add new functionality if this is available on OpenNTF. Can I install a new ExtLib version on top of the Upgrade Pack 1 or do I have to wait for Upgrade Pack 2 in this case?
@Martin – My understanding is that you can mix and match the ExtLib with the UP, but you need to test on a case by case basis. I think in reality that shops which require supported software on their servers will use the UP, everyone else will continue to use the ExtLib.
Matt
Hi Matt.
I am not sure what you mean by it is more difficult to distribute the upgrade pack in a large organization as opposed to the ext lib? The opposite was the goal.. It 'should' be easier to install the upgrade pack.
The upgrade pack installer is based on the Lotus/IBM fix pack installer platform, so administrators should be able to distribute and install the upgrade pack in the same manner as any fix pack they receive.
The first dialog that appears when installing the upgrade pack gives you the option to 'leave the installation files on the system when I finish' (or words to that effect 🙂 )… Choosing this option leaves the 'updatesite.zip' file on your system, in which case you can use the update site installer just as you would from OpenNTF, in which case I believe you get the best of both worlds.
I'd be interested in hearing of specific issues which make the upgrade pack more difficult to install than the Ext lib, we went to a considerable amount of effort to make this not the case.
Thanks for taking the time to look into this..
Enjoy 🙂
Dan
Dan,
The big issue for me is that the UP-1 installation doesn't change the version number of Notes or Domino at all. That means, as an enterprise administrator, I have no way of knowing who has – or who doesn't have – UP-1 installed. Server OR client.
MR's change the version number so we can use smart upgrade to roll it out and keep things in line. Even if I used Smart Upgrade to roll this out, in the future I'd have no way of knowing who had it and who didn't. Checking the file system is a poor alternative.
You're correct about the updatesite.zip being extracted as part of the install (I had missed that) – but only for the client. There doesn't seem to be a server equivalent.
My main concern is that there seems to be some duality here in how this sort of thing should be deployed. My understanding was that update sites were 'the future' – especially for Eclipse features. But now IBM are shipping eclipse features that are designed NOT to be installed via an update site. It seems a little disjointed and that there should be one preferred method of doing this, not two. Or if there are two, document the fact there are two ways of doing this.
Warren Elsmore