If you have active business applications running on Lotus Notes (aka HCL Domino), you may well have contemplated the future of that platform and whether you should consider migrating your applications away from Lotus Notes or not. If you haven’t had that internal debate, then it’s pretty likely that someone in your organization has. Here at Teamstudio, we happen to think that the future for the Domino platform is pretty bright under the ownership of HCL, but we know that decisions about which application platform to use are taken for a variety of different reasons. Not all of them are based on technical or financial merit, or even pure logic.
The point is that, before you make any decisions about migrating applications away from Lotus Notes, you have a lot of data gathering to do. I would venture to say that many people and organizations who are considering such a migration are missing at least one key piece of information about their environment: the usage patterns of their Notes applications.
In fact, in our totally unscientific, unofficial poll based on nothing but daily conversations with Notes and Domino professionals around the world, we found that most organizations that embark on a Lotus Notes application migration project wildly underestimate both the number of active applications and the extent to which they are being used and relied upon by users. On the other hand, some overestimate the usage of these applications. One of our customers had over 30 servers around the world, with more than 30,000 databases. Once they started to carefully and systematically measure the business usage of these applications, they discovered that only a third of them were actually being used by business users at all.
It’s fairly common for the number of Notes databases in a large organization to get out of control. This may even be part of the rationale to switch platforms (i.e., “Let’s reduce our licensing costs”). Unfortunately, Domino itself doesn’t make it easy to track these files and applications. One challenge in identifying what’s being used is that some reporting tools (like the Catalog) lump all activity together. This means that, as far as Domino is concerned, user activity, server activity and scheduled agent activity all count the same. But they are not the same. For example, you could have a scheduled agent running, which then causes the database to replicate – but no users are accessing the database. Similarly, a Domino based mailbox may continue to receive mail (including spam) long after the user has left the company.
All of this is even more reason why it’s vital to perform some kind of survey or audit of the actual business usage of your Domino apps before you even have the conversation about whether it makes sense to consider switching platforms. Which is where Teamstudio Adviser comes in.
Adviser’s Usage module collects detailed usage information stored in the Domino log file. It allows you to see information about the extent to which your databases are being used and who is using them. Unlike the standard Domino catalog, it distinguishes between web and client usage and also separates usage by individual users from usage by agents or servers. Adviser differentiates between web browser and Notes client access, allowing you potentially to reduce your client licensing costs. You can zoom in and find out specifically which users have used which databases, and which agents have run on it.
Here’s an app with 48 users, but almost all the usage is attributable to two people.
Also, a Domino server only keeps usage information for 14 days, so it’s important that you run usage scans regularly to import the data into Adviser before it is lost. Adviser stores usage data indefinitely, allowing you to build up a picture of usage patterns over an extended period of time. In fact, the graphing features of Adviser show you how usage is trending over time. You can also combine results from different databases with the same replica ID, allowing you to see the usage across all replicas of the same database.
To summarize, there’s no point in having a conversation about migrating your business applications away from Notes and Domino as an application environment until and unless you have a clear picture of the actual business usage patterns of your databases. Teamstudio Adviser gives you an easy way to do that to allow your organization to make informed decisions about your application migration path.
To learn more about Adviser, click below.