If you’re reading this, you are almost certainly no stranger to Lotus Notes. The venerable mail and application server platform has been around a long time - more than 30 years. You won’t need me to tell you that one of the most compelling features of Lotus Notes in its heyday in the 90s and 00s, was the ability for just about anyone to create a useful business application. This was the domain of what we used to call the Power User - anyone who had played around with the formula languages baked into Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Excel could suddenly put together a way more sophisticated, forms-based application. And, they could do it without having to call on the IT department for anything.
Back in the 90s, this was revolutionary. Suddenly, workgroups within an organization had the ability to create their own apps, highly customized to their specific needs, and built by business people with an intimate knowledge of their own requirements. Not only could these apps be cooked up really quickly, but they could easily be tweaked as requirements changed over time. Notes installations grew like wildfire, from fewer than 3 million licenses in 1995 to more than 140 million at its peak in 2008.
As you can imagine, tens of millions of users, each with the ability to create their own applications at will, resulted in a lot of applications. And, because the apps were all built by users, in most cases the IT department didn’t really have any idea how many there were, what data they contained, or who was using them.
The fact is, there are many organizations who now find themselves with a large number of Lotus Notes databases that they need to archive. Perhaps you are migrating away from Lotus Notes, or maybe you’ve just discovered that there are a lot more Lotus Notes databases in your organization than you thought. Either way, you don’t want to just delete all that data. Aside from any data retention policy that you may have in place, it’s usually a good idea to archive your old Notes databases just in case someone needs to refer back to something. Even if you’ve already migrated the data from Lotus Notes to some other platform, our experience is that a data migration project is a good opportunity to prune out a lot of old records. You may have a need to go back and find something that existed in the old database that didn’t get migrated to the new platform.
Depending on your situation, it’s possible that the most challenging part of archiving your old Lotus Notes databases will be finding all the candidates and then triaging them to decide what to do with each one. That’s a subject for another day; what I want to focus on here is the process of actually archiving them.
Starting with the format of the archive, this largely depends on what you intend to use the archives for. If you think that you might want to re-import the data into some other database format later, then your best bet is almost certainly to archive into as simple a flat-file format as possible. CSV, obviously, comes to mind, but there are some significant reasons why that format doesn’t work well when archiving Lotus Notes databases. In particular, much of the data is typically stored in rich text fields, which can’t be stored and retrieved as CSV. There is also the small matter of file attachments, which can’t be exported to CSV format either.
In our experience, a more common anticipated use for the archives is to allow users to browse, and in particular to search for data in the archives long after they were created. CSV doesn’t lend itself well to that task, which implies either importing the Lotus Notes data into some other database format, or keeping some number of Notes licenses active just to allow people to access the archives. In either case, the drawback will be that you will need to continue to pay a license fee to someone to continue to be able to access your archives. Which is, in many cases, a big part of the reason why you want to archive all that data in the first place.
It won’t surprise you to learn that we’ve spend a good deal of time working on this issue and coming up with a solution ourselves. It’s called Teamstudio Export and, despite the fact that it was originally conceived as a tool for creating general purpose XML format archives, we’ve found that our customers use it almost exclusively to create searchable, browsable and easy-to-distribute HTML format files.
One possible approach that we considered was to export each Notes document as a PDF file. That would have the benefit of capturing a snapshot of the data as if each individual Notes document had been printed. There are significant drawbacks to the export to PDF approach, however. The forms that are used to display Lotus Notes documents on screen are typically pretty interactive, more like a web page than a static PDF document. Elements such as tabbed tables, where the user can switch to different tabs within a table, or embedded views that allow the user to scroll a view within a window on a form, cannot be represented in PDF format.
All of which is why our approach with Export is to render the document in HTML format within a browser, replicating the look and feel of the original Notes form as closely as possible, while allowing the user to interact with the data as much as possible too. Views that are visible in Notes are replicated in the archive, full text search is supported and the overall user experience is not unlike viewing a database in the Lotus Notes client in read-only mode. And, bonus: there are no ongoing licensing fees to pay to anyone. Once the archives are created, you can continue to use them in perpetuity.
So, if you have a need to archive your old Lotus Notes databases, I would urge you to think carefully about what the archives will be used for, and take that into account when deciding on an archive format. Of course I’m biased, but I would also suggest you take a look at Teamstudio Export as a possible solution!
To learn more about Export, click below.