Since the global Coronavirus pandemic has had the world in its grip over the past 15 months or so, I’ve noticed a rather poetic sounding phrase has been used time and time again, especially by politicians: “an abundance of caution.” In March 2020, senator Ted Cruz self quarantined after coming in contact with a COVID patient out of an abundance of caution. It was an abundance of caution that caused the Johnson & Johnson vaccine rollout to be paused this past April. And when the president of the United States himself contracted the disease in October 2020, he was transported to hospital by helicopter out of an abundance of caution.
Under many circumstances, the U.S. commander in chief being helicoptered to hospital after contracting a potentially deadly airborne disease would cause concern, possibly even mild panic, amongst many people. But somehow, by couching these messages in that magical phrase, it seems less worrisome. It’s a great example of how words can be used to influence how messages are received.
The concept of an abundance of caution is not new, of course. Growing up in England, we used the phrase “belt and braces” to mean a similar thing. (Google tells me “belt and braces” translates to U.S. English as “belt and suspenders”, but I’ve never heard that phrase being used in real life.) Belt and braces, of course, implies taking double the usually accepted level of precautions against some terrible outcome - in this case, one’s pants (or trousers, if you’re a Brit), falling down. Which is a familiar concept to many of us who work in the tech industry - we call it redundancy. A single point of failure, I was taught from a pretty young age, is a bad thing.
Which brings me to the subject of application data archival. Many of our customers are in the midst of projects to migrate their old Lotus Notes applications to some other platform. Some are modernizing their older apps and staying on the Domino platform. Yet others are leaving well alone, continuing to use older apps while updating the Domino servers and Notes clients that they are running on. Whichever path you are taking, it’s a good idea to think carefully about archiving your Notes applications before you start. Any of these approaches has a potentially significant impact on the precious data within these apps, and it’s appropriate to exercise an abundance of caution, whether you’re moving, migrating or modernizing.
Teamstudio Export, in many ways, embodies that concept. Export can take your old Lotus Notes databases and transform them into searchable, read-only, web-based archives that replicate all the visible views in the original database and present Notes documents on screen in almost the exact way you’d see them if you were using a Notes client. It can also convert every Notes document in a database to a PDF document, creating a web site that allows users to navigate and search for the documents. Or you can upload the PDFs to the content management system of your choice. But before Export performs any of this magic, it creates an XML format archive of the entire database, (including the design of the application).
Once you’ve created the XML archive, you have a complete record of every aspect of the original Notes database. Because it’s in XML format, you can pick it apart using any standard XML viewer. And once you’ve created the HTML or PDF versions, you don’t need any licensed software to be able to browse, search and view the original data - the web sites are distributable royalty free in perpetuity. And you always have the XML master archive to go back to. It’s what you might call a belt and braces approach, or possibly even “an abundance of caution.”
To learn more about Teamstudio Export, click below. And remember, if you’re an IBM employee, you already own this product. Contact us to learn more about that.