Deploying a Custom Corporate Welcome Page for Lotus Notes R7



We recently deployed our Custom Corporate Welcome Page following the instructions from the Lotus developerWorks documentation but as other people have posted, not everyone has been successful with this.

Overview
We had been using a customized Bookmarks but decided to try the Custom Welcome Page because of the ease in using Policies for rollout. To keep close to our corporate standard, instead of one of the pre-designed templates, I went with the blank document and while this makes a bit more work, I was able to almost duplicate our original look. Along the way, I found some things that may help others.

Keep in mind:

  • you only get 1 rich text field to work with
  • only image resources that exist in bookmarks.ntf template are availble
  • the code editor doesn't show up for things like Computed Text, Hotspots, etc.

    • Steps
    1. Follow the instructions in from Lotus developerWorks documentation

    2. Do everything until you get to step 5 in "Designing the base of your customized Welcome Page" where it tells you how to add the Clouds background. Skip this (unless you want a Clouds background).

    3. Continue on and in "Creating the final design touches", after step 1, skip steps 2, 3, and 4.

    4. (This is where you create the look of your Welcome Page.) Create a new form in Designer. It may be a good idea to even create the Welcome Page in the body of a mail message. This helps because since the Body field in an email is rich text, you find out exactly what you can and can't use in your Custom Welcome Page.

    5.Create all design elements that you might want:

  • insert all images (do not use image resources as the local bookmarks.nsf won't have access to them)
  • create all computed text, hotspots, and buttons
  • only add elements that can be inserted inside a rich text field
  • easier if you create a table and space everything as you want inside of it

    • 6.When you are done, copy everything and paste it into the rich text field in the blank Welcome Page you have to work with (the page you left in step 3)

    7. Change the background image of the Welcome Page using the document properties box. Don't forget that if you want to use an image, you have to paste or import it.

    8. Tip Of The Day. We still wanted to use this in our Welcome Page so I converted it to Computed Text. It doesn't have the buttons to change the tip but it does show a different tip each time you enter Notes.

    9.Once you have it the way you want it, continue on in "Creating the final design touches" with step 5.

    I also found that when you make any changes to the Custom Welcome database on the server, it seems to be enough to go into the Settings document that it is included on and just Edit and Save. As others have noted (see forum posting) this seems to be enough to trigger a refresh.

    Applying the Policy
    We had a situation where some people would get the new page right away when they started Notes but others wouldn't. There's a field called "Profiles" on their Person document in names.nsf that seems to cause problems. It is labelled "Setup profiles" on the Administration tab. If something is entered in this field, it seems to prevent the Policy from being applied when the user enters Notes. While the Policies are successfully downloaded to their local Names.nsf, they do not seem to take effect. I hope this helps. While we've lost some of the functionality of our old Bookmarks, the simplicity of pushing out the Welcome Page using Policies makes this very worthwhile.

    Then:
    1. First, replicate this to your server. Open the database and select the "Generic Page". Then click "customize this page", and click next through all the options - this will add it to your local list of pages.

    2. Then, open the policy document and drag a doclink of this database. You can then select the "Generic Page" option. Hopefully, this should work. Basically, it's a single-page welcome page - which is an option in the setup, but only allows rich text objects - so there are no tips or search fields - it should deploy fine though. Finally, the option we've used before is to edit the MSI that is used for the setup, to distribute a custom bookmarks.ntf file in the install.

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