With Seascape for Notes, Indriya’s client—a large global chemical company—reduces its Lotus Notes footprint and licensing costs by archiving databases to a web platform
Databases
Gigabytes
Documents
Users
Partner
Indriya builds and operates remote monitoring systems for the enterprise. Its additional areas of expertise include SAP ERP system management and software development for business and industrial applications.
Challenge
Indriya’s client—a large global chemical company—needed to reduce its Lotus Notes footprint and licensing costs by archiving databases to a web platform. About 100 Lotus Notes databases were identified as candidates for archiving, and Indriya set out to find the best and most cost-effective solution for its client.
“We needed to move quickly through the 100 databases. We tried the demo version of SWING Seascape and found it to be efficient and robust.”
— Niraj Agarwal, Partner
Solution for Lotus Notes documents archiving
Initially, Indriya looked at several Notes migration options. They found early on that the licensing and implementation costs of these alternative solutions were very high. Also, while the systems offered a multitude of migration options, they were found to be unnecessarily complex and probably overkill for the specific scope Indriya had in mind.
“We needed to move quickly through the 100 databases,” said Niraj Agarwal, Partner at Indriya. “We tried the demo version of SWING Seascape for Notes and found it to be efficient and robust. We received good technical support and transparent pricing on the solution.”
Indriya also thought about engaging an external provider to handle the archiving process. But after working with Seascape for a while, they found that no special expertise was needed in order to run the product, so it was decided that they would perform the export entirely on their own.
On top of performing the application export with Seascape, Indriya also built a custom .NET web application for their client, which now serves as a wrapper around the Seascape archives. Within this wrapper, Indriya has introduced advanced search options and user management capabilities while leaving the door open to future custom enhancements.
Results
The Seascape archive looked great when opened in a web browser and mimicked the original Notes application layouts perfectly, resulting in exceptionally high user acceptance of this solution. Currently, about 400 people at the client’s organization are using the Seascape archives to access legacy Notes data. The archives themselves consist of about 120 GB worth of data and 1.8 million Lotus Notes documents, which were created without any known issues.
In addition to the PDFs produced, all the attachments were nicely preserved. Another important feature of Seascape’s exports is that they save Notes metadata in multiple JSON files, which provides an easy way to move the data to a NoSQL cloud database in case such a requirement arises in the future.
With more than 15 years of experience in data migration and compliance archiving, we will gladly share with you some of the best practices.
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