There is no silver bullet for swiftly modernizing an aged IT environment, but there is one thing that can certainly be done: reducing dependence on legacy systems.
Key points:
- Application data archiving boosts IT modernization
- O-I Glass, Inc. successfully retired 110 Domino servers with 10,000 databases
- A staged, gradual approach works best for large-scale application migrations
One of the greatest barriers to cloud adoption are legacy applications. There is no silver bullet for swiftly modernizing any aged IT environment, but there is one thing that can certainly be done: reducing dependence on legacy systems. How? By detaching historical data from old applications and then retiring these applications.
The transition from one strategic application platform to another typically takes much longer than expected if it is not planned properly. Many organizations that have migrated away from Notes/Domino email tend to keep their remaining Domino servers and applications running just to provide access to accumulated legacy data. It is not much different with other platforms that are deeply entrenched in an organization.
As a result, the company liberated itself from caring about important legacy data and boosted its IT transformation. The historical data has been converted to open standard formats, as well as archived for future reference and eDiscovery.
O-I Glass, Inc. (NYSE: OI), a Fortune 500 company, is a global distributed organization that wanted to migrate from Notes and Domino to cloud-native platforms in order to keep all locations of the large company in sync. Its on-premises Notes and Domino environment had been developed and used across the company for years. How large was the legacy environment? 10,000 Lotus Notes databases were running on 110 Domino servers.
The company’s IT group carefully planned and executed the transition. A gradual approach was applied, so that the old and new platforms and applications coexisted for some time.
Applications are transitioned either to commercial solutions or to modern application platforms. A range of new custom solutions has been created leveraging the Microsoft 365 or ServiceNow cloud platforms.
Lotus Notes data was not migrated to the new solution in most cases. Instead, O-I Glass opted to close the historical data in the Lotus Notes applications and archive it with SWING Software’s Seascape for Notes data archiving solution. With the historical data out of the way, O-I Glass now had a clean start for new solutions.
“Seascape provided a web solution similar to the user’s experience in Lotus Notes,” said Diane Jackson, the analyst/developer who worked on the Lotus Notes decommissioning project at O-I Glass, “The Lotus Notes categorized views are transformed as is. The forms, embedded views, and doclinks are sustained. These posed challenges with other archiving solutions or were not possible.”
As a result, the company liberated itself from caring about important legacy data and boosted its IT transformation. The historical data has been converted to open standard formats, as well as archived for future reference and eDiscovery.
Learn more about this success story in the interview: Lotus Notes Decommissioning Project at O-I Glass, Inc.
References:
- Owens-Illinois sees clear advantage in driving collaborative agenda with Office 365
- Lotus Notes Decommissioning Project at O-I Glass, Inc.
Do you have a specific Notes application decommissioning or data archiving project you would like to discuss with us? Please send us your thoughts, comments or questions.
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