There are many reasons why you might want to create static, read-only archives of HCL Domino (formerly Lotus Notes) databases. If you are migrating or have migrated off of the Notes/Domino platform, it’s a great idea to keep an archive copy of the data as it was at the point of migration. Alternatively, if you’re continuing to support HCL Domino within your organization, there are bound to be old, disused applications that would benefit from being archived to a format that can easily be distributed and maintained in the future.
We’ve done this a lot, and so have many of our customers. There are a few things we’ve learned that you need to think about before you get going with an archiving project. Here are three key steps you should take to prepare.
Step 1: Understand your environment
Clearly the most obvious reason to archive Notes/Domino data is because you are involved in a project to migrate away from the platform. We’ve written before about how to start with a data migration project. It’s important to get a clear view of your application landscape so that you can start to separate the applications into a few buckets:
port to new platform or perhaps replace with an off-the-shelf application;
retire and archive;
for complex apps used by a small group of people, potentially continue to support them in the Domino environment.
For the applications that fall into one of the first two groups, it’s a good idea to archive them to a format that can easily be used to search and find data in the future. It’s quite likely that some data will not make it into the new environment, either by mistake or by design. Sometimes this is a good opportunity to prune out elderly data - but it’s as well to keep a safe copy of it, just in case.
Even if you have no plans to move away from HCL Domino as an application server, there are some good reasons to archive certain applications. If an audit of your application environment turns up applications that have fallen into disuse, it’s a good idea to archive them to a read-only format. If a user needs to find data that’s held within an old application, and that app hasn’t been used for some time, it’s entirely likely that something got broken that will prevent even a simple enquiry from taking place. For example, an @DbLookup into a view that no longer exists. Sometimes elements of the design such as subforms or forms mysteriously get deleted from the database. Even if nothing is broken, view indexes will likely have been deleted and full text search indexes may have been cleaned up. Exporting the database to a clean, self-contained and easily searchable archive will avoid all these problems.
Step 2: Choose a format for your archives
There are many options to choose from when creating archives of your HCL Domino databases. You can export Notes forms to PDF format (akin to printing all the docs in a database), you can convert to a different database format, or you can create HTML-based sites from the Domino data.
Based on the fact that we are the authors of Teamstudio Export, we are, of course, biased in this regard. Export creates stand-alone, read-only HTML-based archives of Domino databases that reproduce the look and feel of the forms in the original application. We think that’s the best solution, so it might help to understand why we chose this approach. Here are a few reasons.
Presenting the data in HTML provides an easy way to distribute the archives to users. All they need to be able to search and view archive data is a browser, and all you need to distribute the archives is a file server or web server.
The data is stored in plain text files, which means that there is no need for an application server or database engine. As well as simplifying the infrastructure needed to distribute archives, this also reduces cost.
Speaking of cost, the licensing model for Teamstudio Export is based on a per-workstation license for the tool itself. There is no runtime licensing required, so that once you’ve exported your databases, there is no recurring license fee.
Full text searching is supported without the need for an application server of any kind. (As of today, you don’t even need a web server to distribute archives, they can be read from local files. As we add more features to the finished archives, it is possible that we will require a web server to be able to support some features in the future.)
Step 3: Think about security
This is a common question that comes up when archiving and, considering how full-featured the Domino security model is, it’s not surprising. Our philosophy on this is that the exported data is an archive and, as such, it’s not appropriate for the archiving tool to implement a full-blown, per-user security model. That would also run counter to our design goal of allowing server-free distribution of archive files.
The only constraint on the archive, from a security perspective, is that it is based on a Notes ID file that is used by the tool itself to create the archive. And so that ID should have full access to the database to be able to create a full archive of it. And, when you’re distributing the archives, you need to make sure that you take into account the fact that any user that has access to a database will have access to all data in that database.
While that may not be ideal in all situations, we feel that it’s a fair trade for the ability to be able to distribute archives easily and at low cost.
In Summary
If you have Notes/Domino databases that you want to archive, then step one is always to understand your application environment and sort the apps based on what you plan to do with them. As is often the case, we strongly believe that tooling helps!
Once you have a list of the databases you want to archive, you can think about the best format and means of distribution. If you want to provide easy access to end users at a low cost, then our recommendation is to export to searchable HTML archives.
Finally, don’t forget about security. You need to make sure that you’re not suddenly providing access to sensitive data to users who have been excluded from it by a carefully crafted security model.
Once you’ve taken these three steps, the actual process of creating the archives and distributing them is relatively easy. Good luck and, if you want to talk to us about any aspect of archiving Notes and Domino data, click below to start a conversation. We love to chat!