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What are companies using to replace Lotus Notes Applications that have been used in their company's?

Thank you, Jean

Jean
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4 Answers4

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Several ways:

  • upgrade: replace Notes by Notes R9
  • move to XPages on Domino (browser-based Notes)
  • move to a cloud-based Domino environment (there are many)

But most importantly: ask a good Notes development team to evaluate and optimize your applications, especially when they date from way back (previous century?).

To completely replace Domino and Notes and a lot of Notes applications, you might need 5 to 10 other applications, and servers, and licences, and administrators... to end up with 10 different systems that do not really work together (i.e. collaborate). Then what's your gain?

D.Bugger
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  • Yes, I totally agree, but as usual, it wasn't our decision to make. It was upper management wanting to go to Exchange and they now want to no longer see anything to do with Lotus Notes. In the midst of all of this we are also changing our ERP system which is going to take a number of years for the change, so we are needing to come up with some type of solution with our users. – Jean Dec 11 '15 at 11:47
  • You can hide the fact that the applications are built in Notes. Either you rewrite them as XPages applications, or you rewrite the UI for all applications as a web application (use Bootstrap and jQuery to speed this process up some) and have it work with the Domino backend. I did a presentation at MWLUG about this. You can find the presentation here: http://blog.texasswede.com/mwlug-2015/ I will also do a similar presentation at Connect 2016. – Karl-Henry Martinsson Dec 14 '15 at 16:39
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I was working at an company using exchange, yet we still used Notes and Designer to develop web/xpage/bootstrap applications.

As far as a user is concerned, they think it is a normal website, with no links to notes.

This way you can still utilise the current in house development team and their skill-sets....

Chris Richards
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A lot of companies have (failed) Sharepoint migrations, where they try to use Sharepoint to do what custom Notes applications used to do for them. Salesforce.com has been another target of Notes migrations. Either solution involves entirely rewriting every Notes app from scratch.

Moving from Notes is a hugely expensive process, and should never be done just because "we want to use exchange". Exchange is a mail platform, and there's no reason you can't use Exchange for your mail, and Domino for your applications, either web only or web/notes client. There's a fancy custom Notes browser plugin to allow you to access Notes DB's that weren't designed for web use in the plugin on the web, without a full client install.

Fundamentally, if you are willing to rewrite every app you need, any front end/back end solution would work. I'd suggest PhP/mySQL, because PhP is very easy to learn and your former Notes dev team can probably spend the next 5 years rewriting everything in PhP, and at the end of the process, they'll be PhP experts you want to keep around to manage your new PhP apps. A huge advantage of PhP is cost.

Joe Brender
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I am presently working in a company that is migrating several Notes application.

These IBM Notes applications are mainly being migrated into Microsoft Office Solutions. The main Microsoft Office Solution destinations are Sharepoint, Access, Excel, Flow, Exchange and Outlook.

Some very complicated Notes applications are temporarily being upgraded into a newer Notes version (9.0.1 FP10 x64).

Some reference data management Notes applications are moved into the Orchestra EBX solution.

Some ticket Notes applications are moved into the Glidesoft ServiceNow.

Michael Fayad
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