If you’ve visited this blog before, you’ll know that we are fans of HCL and the product strategy they are deftly executing for the Domino platform. Despite the indisputable progress HCL has made in making massive improvements to the platform, some of our customers are still moving away from Notes and, for a variety of reasons, feel the need to migrate their older applications to a different platform.
While this process may sound easy, in practice any application migration project is risky, time consuming and usually involves some significant compromises having to be made. Nonetheless, the promise of a new application on a shinier platform is tempting, and many IT groups find themselves embarking on an adventure that may not necessarily be of their choosing.
One of the greatest strengths of the Notes platform has always been the fact that any user was able to build a simple app. (Or a complex one.) It’s what HCL likes to call “empowering the citizen developer”. The only problem now is that many organizations who have had Notes deployed for some number of years (or even decades) find that they have a significantly greater number of active applications than they may have thought. And so the prospect of figuring out what to do with each of those applications may start to feel overwhelming.
As Desmond Tutu famously said, there’s only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at a time. In this case, each bite equates to an analysis of each Notes application in turn, with a view to determining its level of usage, complexity and business value. Then there are really only three possible outcomes for each app:
Migrate. Applications with a low level of complexity and high usage could be replaced with an off-the-shelf solution or rebuilt on a different platform.
Retain. For applications with high complexity, low usage but high business value it may make sense to consider retaining them on the current platform for a small number of users. In many cases it would be too costly, risky or both to consider a migration.
Retire. Databases with low to zero usage can usually be retired.
For every application that will be migrated or retired, it’s a good idea to create an easily accessible archive copy of the data. Also migrating an application from Notes to some other system usually offers a good opportunity to clean up old data. You may, for example, decide only to migrate the last one or two years of data. Especially in that case, but usually in any case, it’s wise to keep a backup archive copy of the old Lotus Notes database as it was at the time of retirement or migration.
Even if you are not migrating away from the Lotus Notes platform, if you’ve had a Notes application infrastructure for any length of time, there are most likely older databases that are no longer used and have reached retirement age. It’s a good idea to scoop up these old, disused databases and archive them somewhere they can easily be accessed in the future.
If you’re archiving databases for any reason, but especially if you are aiming to be able to shut down your Lotus Notes environment in the future, you want to find an archive format that is independent of the Lotus Notes/Domino platform. Ideally, you’re looking for an archive format that is independent of any vendor. By their nature, archives of this type need to be stored safely for long periods of time, but also need to be easily accessible by any user who wants to look up some historical piece of data.
Given that archiving is such an important aspect of a project like this, we’ve put together a detailed, stepwise guide to archiving your old Lotus Notes databases. Essentially it breaks down into three key steps: planning the project, archiving the data, and storing and provisioning the archives. For good measure, we also added a section on security considerations.
There’s too much text to put it all on this blog post, so we’ve packaged it up and made it available for free to anyone who asks! To request your copy of our stepwise guide to archiving Lotus Notes databases, click below.