Running Lotus Notes Client in a Virtual Desktop environment

I am posting this in response to a question on the vSpecialist mailing list - hopefully others will find it useful as well.

There shouldn't be any technical reason why you can't install and use Notes with a thin, stateless desktop.  Notes has been run in XenApp/Presentation Server/Metaframe/Winframe for years, which is an inherently thin/stateless environment.  The same techniques that can enable Notes to run in Terminal Services should enable it to run in a stateless desktop...

This may not be entirely accurate, but it should go so meting like this:

1) Install Notes off the CD with all the standard defaults except install the data drive to a common mapped drive where each user will store Notes data. e.g. o:drive

2) Make a folder called something like LotusNotesNotesini and move Lotus\Notes\notes.ini into that folder.

3) Write a batch file which will run on the first time that a user logs onto Terminal Server (View desktop). This batch file should copy all the following files into the users data directory from the original data directory: *.ntf & *.dic.

4) From the LotusNotesNotesini folder copy notes.ini to the users winnt profile directory.

5) Log into Windows Terminal Server as a user and when the batch file has run you are then able to configure Notes for that user.

If you want to, you could program your batch file to look for differences between the original names.ntf and the one coppied to the user so that if the original one changes (because you have run an upgrade), new *.ntf file will be coppied over to all users to complete the upgrade.

(The above steps are pulled from http://searchdomino.techtarget.com/tip/Deploying-Lotus-Notes-in-a-Terminal-Server-environment)

Of course, you can always ThinApp it as well - someone has posted a somewhat grainy video of a successfully virtualized Notes 8.5 client here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0--yPcRGAjE

It's also worth mentioning that the VMware Release notes for Thinapp have references to Lotus Notes as far back as 2009, at least.  In some cases the notes were for known issues, in other cases for resolved issues.  Either way, it's been done, and if you can thinApp it, you can define where the sandbox goes for the user's mail, which means you can put it on a network share, in their profile, wherever.