Upgrading Your Elderly Lotus Notes/Domino Infrastructure is Easier Than You Think

By Nigel Cheshire

As you may know, here at Teamstudio we straddle both sides of the “migrate vs modernize” divide when it comes to Lotus Notes, aka HCL Domino. We have a suite of tools that has helped IT professionals build, manage and maintain their Domino based applications for decades. More recently, we’ve added tools that help others who are engaged in moving away from the venerable platform. We don’t take a position in what has sometimes seemed like a religious war, on the basis that we just want to help our customers achieve their goals and get the best outcomes possible. For some, that means sticking with the Notes/Domino platform, for others, it means moving away. And for many, it means a bit of both.

With that in mind, we know that there are many environments where Domino is maintained mostly to support a single key business application, or a suite of applications. In some of those environments, the people with the most experience of managing and maintaining a Domino infrastructure have moved on from the company. This leaves some organizations with a sort of “black box” approach to their Domino app, running on an ancient and unsupported version of Domino. They may be fearful of upgrading the Domino environment because of the risk of breaking something that would be very difficult to fix. Not ideal for a key business application.

If that sounds familiar, and you’ve avoided the whole issue of upgrading to the latest and greatest version of Domino, then I’m here to tell you that the upgrade process is significantly easier and simpler than you most likely think it is.

There are three main factors that make upgrading to Domino 11 easier than you’d think.

1. Backwards Compatibility/Upgrade In Place

We’ve talked about this before; one of the key features of the many versions of Notes and Domino that have been released over the years is that, for the most part, new versions are backwards compatible with older versions, when it comes to supporting your customized Domino applications. In other words, you can usually take an application that was built to run on a very early version of Notes, and it will run perfectly fine on v11.

There are, of course, some exceptions to this, which is why we created the Upgrade Filters - an add-on to Teamstudio Analyzer that will spot potential problems and allow you to rectify them as part of the upgrade process. But, exceptions notwithstanding, the Domino server can usually be upgraded in place or, for the more faint of heart, a parallel server can be set up, and the apps can be transferred onto it for testing. Just one server to upgrade, no database schema mapping, no fiddling with access control, everything should just work. It’s a far cry from the upgrade process on many other application server environments, not to mention a breeze compared to migrating to a completely new platform.

2. New Client Options

Upgrading to the latest version of Domino opens the door to some more manageable options (not to mention popular with users) for the client environment. Of course you can stick with the Eclipse-based Notes client, but if you’d prefer to work with something a little less, err, portly, there are now some other interesting options.

HCL Nomad is a new(ish) client that allows you to run your Notes applications, unchanged for the most part, on iOS or Android mobile devices. The deftly named HCL Client Application Access (HCAA) has been around for a while (it was an IBM product originally) and does, theoretically, allow you to run your Domino apps in a browser on a desktop or laptop. However, the smart money is waiting for HCL’s “forthcoming” Nomad Web Client app, which is essentially an implementation of Nomad for browsers, and will allow you to run your apps in said browsers with a much smaller footprint than HCAA.

3. Simplified Licensing Model

However much we love IBM, good old big blue does have a way of making things that could be simple, complex. If you preside over a Notes/Domino environment that harks from IBM’s ownership of the product, I’m going to hazard a guess and say that the annual calculation of your license costs is quite a project. Unless you like building spreadsheets filled with PVUs, RVUs and VPUs to calculate your license costs, then you will be very happy with the new licensing model that HCL has introduced. It’s a monthly subscription based on the number of users per month. That’s it.

Bonus: Domino Volt

We think that, if you’re on an older version of Domino, upgrading to version 11 just makes sense. HCL has done a lot to make the process easy and cost-effective, especially compared to the alternative. But there’s an added bonus. In case you missed it, HCL recently launched Domino Volt - a new add-on to Domino that allows you to build simple, web based business applications using your Domino infrastructure. No need for Domino Designer or the Notes client; Volt will let you build forms-based apps that run in a browser as easily as you could have built a Notes app 25 years ago. But, you need to be on Domino 11 (technically Domino 11.0.1) to be able to run Volt.

So, if you’re still running an elderly Domino infrastructure, perhaps to keep that one “black box” app running, we think you should consider upgrading to v11 now. If that’s something you’re interested in doing, or if you have questions about any aspect of upgrading to Domino 11, click below to start a conversation. We love to chat!

By the way, before I get accused of plagiarism, I want to acknowledge that this post is, in large part, a distillation of the information included in Andy Porter’s excellent slide deck on this subject, which goes into quite a bit more detail than I have space for here.