Lotus Notes Decommissioning

HCL Domino decommissioning: the challenge

Companies typically avoid retiring their legacy Lotus Notes applications and also decommissioning HCL Domino servers as long as they expect that historical data might be sporadically accessed for reference. It’s often easier to keep the old data where it was rather than to extract it.

Really, why bother with HCL Domino decommissioning while legacy applications still work as data repositories?

“The application retirement is an essential step in the Domino Application lifecycle.”

— IBM Redbooks: Domino Development Best Practices

As it turns out, there are actually numerous reasons why you should consider archiving inactive data and retiring legacy applications. Let’s begin with some quick facts about application lifecycle management (ALM):

• Almost 70% of all organizations are focusing on consolidating or rationalizing their application portfolios (source: KPMG).
• The majority of data accumulated over the years in any database is inactive. It becomes a bottleneck in application modernization or migration efforts.
• Data retention periods cannot be adjusted to fit your system’s lifespan. Instead, they are determined by business, regulatory, and compliance requirements.
• It is the CIO’s responsibility to preserve valuable historical data before the process becomes too difficult or too expensive.

In Gartner’s seven-step course of action for IT architects to migrate legacy Lotus Notes applications, the last step is the implementation of a decommissioning and archival strategy. To successfully implement this strategy, IT architects need to envision the strategy beforehand.

What is the best archiving method for Notes/Domino data? You can judge each approach by two criteria: the independence it provides and the completeness it provides:

Lotus Notes application retirement: our approach

Without a doubt, the best way to preserve historical data is to extract it from Notes databases and save it in an open standard repository. SWING PDF Converter and Seascape for Notes, our solutions for this type of data archiving, are trusted by over 1,000 organizations around the globe.

The archives created by our solutions are detached from Lotus Notes and Domino, and are highly portable. At the same time, the archives retain your records in their entirety, which means that both the original document and its data context are preserved (including high-fidelity rendering, attachments, links and document hierarchies).

“As we keep data longer or even forever, we will need solutions that are flexible, vendor neutral, support completely open formats and ensure that data can be accessible now and in the future. “

— Active Archive Alliance

Benefits for you

Not only do archiving tools help in Notes application decommissioning, but they can also aid in the following processes:

• Accelerating application modernization by freeing developers from taking care of old application architecture, including the underlying data structure. The archiving tool ensures that old Notes data is saved in a meaningful way outside of Notes and Domino.
• Preserving all historical data before the migration process so that when the time comes, you can migrate only the active data and not worry about historical data.
• Off-loading inactive data from active databases that are still in use, thus creating performance gains.

Lotus Notes retirement best practices

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. With more than 15 years of experience in Lotus Notes retirement and data migration, we will gladly share with you some of our best practices.