A golden solution for device swaps, mistakes, and accidents – MarvelClient Roaming

The situation we are currently all in together once more proves that it is important for your users to be mobile and flexible when it comes to where they work. Your best friends are your reliable laptop that just works, and your service desk that can quickly fix problems when it doesn’t.

MarvelClient Roaming can help you with both cases.

Let’s take a look at some typical scenarios together.

Think about what a Notes administrator or service desk member must do to deploy new laptops (or desktops) to users. They need to spend a good 20-30 minutes collecting and transferring Notes settings and data from the old device to the new one.

Now imagine the added complexity of a change in versions for operating system and Notes client. The challenges within the notes.ini file are scary enough on their own. New paths to consider for Program-, SharedData, and/or Data directory for one; and don’t even start thinking about settings and preferences that might not work in the new client.
To heap on more topics: Ponder details like ODS upgrades (which is paramount for client performance), local system databases (swapping them to new templates, and more), or Eclipse preferences.

With MarvelClient Roaming, you just hand the user the new laptop with the standard image.
That’s all. You‘re done.

The first time the user starts Notes on the new device, MarvelClient will automatically bring back the user’s up-to-date Notes settings in less than 3 seconds. It adapts to the changes in client version or install type automatically.

Easy as pie.

Well, now we are in a pickle. Under ideal circumstances, you have a week-old filesystem backup. At best, this puts you back into scenario 1 having to manually transfer all of it. Only now it gets even worse because the user loses a week of data.

More realistically though, you will not be doing up regular backups of your laptops (almost nobody does) and have nothing. The user must start from scratch. You lose time helping them, and they have a drop in productivity for a while.

It can work just like in scenario 1. You hand them the new device, done. MarvelClient Roaming does the rest.

With MarvelClient you will always have a current backup set. You can move to a new device any time – without having to plan for it.

Doesn’t that sound fantastic?

It can happen to anybody, and it usually happens at the worst possible time.
They delete a workspace page and lose all their application icons. Or they delete their contacts. They click somewhere they shouldn’t, and now their connection or location documents are misconfigured. We all have countless stories like this.

Usually a Notes administrator or service desk employee has to help them to repair the damage manually. Find all the applications and create new desktop icons and bookmarks. Restore settings, and get the client working again.
But some data cannot be restored, and the user is left to pick up the pieces.

MarvelClient makes it possible. Your service desk can check the backups you have for the user, and just force a restore of the last one that was fine.

One button click, one restart of Notes. Done.

Everyone just gets on with their work.

Not convinced?

MarvelClient Roaming will ensure that every time a Notes client shuts down, a backup set is written to a central place. This place can be a network share (mapped drive, UNC path, etc.) or a Domino database.

A backup set is on average less than a megabyte, though it sometimes can grow to a few megabytes. Into this small size, we squeeze everything a user needs with Notes:

You are in control and can configure how often you want to upload, what should be included, and even how many backup sets you keep for each user.

When MarvelClient detects it is on a device with an outdated state, it will restore the backup set on client startup.