Interview by Hogne Bø Pettersen

Photo by Hogne Bø Pettersen

– My contract with IBM has some limits on things I can say, but it doesn’t stop me from sticking to the facts! As was true when I wrote Opting In, transparency matters…

The words are those of Ed Brill. For many years the personification of IBM Collaboration Solutions, especially the Notes/Domino portfolio, for IBM customers and business partners. He was like a rock star at Lotusphere, the old Lotus software conference that held for over two decades in Orlando in January each year.

The scapegoat

For a few years he went away, but he came back, which gave a lot of people hope for the future for the Domino platform. With his initiative, where the mantra was mobile first, followed by cloud first, some people became skeptical. And because IBM decided not to release any new versions of Notes and Domino but just “Feature Packs,“ some said flat out that IBM was killing the product.

Suddenly last year, it was announced that he was leaving IBM. This sent shockwaves through the community. But not everybody was sad to see him ago. In this business you are not allowed to rest on your laurels, and some didn’t like a lot of the decisions made by the IBM team dealing with collaborations. And Ed Brill was for many the scapegoat, a fact he is well aware of, he tells me in this interview.

Medicine

I meet Ed in a good-old fashioned European-style bar in downtown Chicago on a busy Friday afternoon. It’s his hometown, which he is understandably proud of, and it’s where he has his new job. We order some local brew, and I start my tape recorder. This, I think, is going to be interesting.

– What are you doing these days?

– I’m still a product manager. I run a product management team for a healthcare analytics company here in Chicago. It was founded about 30 years ago and it was designed to address the question: How can we improve the experience for patients in a hospital or doctor setting, based on feedback? This is feedback from surveys taken after you’ve visited your doctor or hospital.

To help with this, Ed’s team runs a series of patient experience clinical and workforce engagement solutions that analyzes the data in a post-encounter environment, with doctors and hospital staff in the US.

Using Microsoft collaboration tools

– Most of the analytics are built inhouse. I have a great team, who in some cases have studied this area for decades. We have a variety of technology platforms, that mostly use the Microsoft stack. But some are being built on other platforms. There is even some DB2 in the mix, so I still have dealings with some IBM technology in house. But mostly it’s a Microsoft shop, with a lot of inhouse developed technologies.

– So, is it mostly email you use, or do you use any other collaboration tools?

– We are using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, and we use Webex every day. We are right now deploying an intranet based on a product called Communifire. It looks suspiciously like IBM Connections, to me. It has all the features of Connections, even features I would never have stolen from Connections, because nobody uses them. Like Bookmarks.

– How was it to start using Outlook?

– Well, there are definitely things about Outlook I do not like. And I’m not just saying that to humour your audience. I think the calendar scheduling in IBM Verse and Notes is far superior. But email is email. I can get my job done, and it’s not all that different.

No to Boston

I decide to go for broke and ask him straight out: Why did he leave IBM?

– There were a couple of things. First of all, I had been in IBM almost my whole career. And I felt as I was approaching 50 that if I didn’t make a move at some point, I was only going to do IBM. And that was going to limit my ability to grow. Because after 24 years I had done so many things at IBM that I felt I was kind of out of things to do.

But Ed also saw what a lot of people have experienced in the past two or three years: IBM has changed its corporate culture completely. From being a company that promoted home offices and the possibility to work from anywhere, they are now demanding that people come into the office. And Ed’s office wasn’t at the IBM office in Chicago. It was in Boston…

– For 18 years I worked from home. I was on the road a lot, but I worked from home. And I had founded roots here that I just couldn’t move away from. And I knew at some point I was going to have to move to Boston, or leave the company.

– What made you choose your new job?

– Now, that’s a much better question. I spent a lot of time thinking on where to go. And I interviewed a lot of different places, both at startups and companies like Salesforce and many more. I had to figure out what I wanted to do. And I really didn’t want to go to a big company again. I wanted to work in a place where I wouldn’t be second guessed all the time.

Like family

Since a lot of companies in Chicago deal with health technology, he felt that was an arena he wanted to try out.

– You know, hospitals in the US have gradually invested in technology. If they have any money to spare, they want to spend it on equipment that’s going to save lives. So, they’ve been slow to adopt new technologies. And if we can introduce them to technologies that they would like to invest in, that would really make a difference in patients’ lives. I find that very exciting.

He does admit it was also hard to leave IBM. He describes it like family.

– And as with families, there’s both good and bad. There are some people in your family that you never want to talk to, but they’re family. And then there are people in your family you love. I built some great teams. And a lot of the people I hired at IBM never left. They came in, they did other jobs, they moved on to more successful things, and I watched their careers and progression… so there was a lot of it I really liked. But at some point… I knew it was over.

The last sentence is said with a slight laugh.

Feature packs

During his time at IBM he was mostly within Lotus and ICS, but he is best known as a product manager and product sales leader. He eventually ended up in IBM’s internal IT organization to get IBM Verse, the new web mail and calendar interface for Domino, up and running. And then he came back to ICS.

– Let’s go back to 2013. IBM Notes 9 is released.

– Right.

– And a decision was made to not release any more versions from then on but only do Feature Packs. But with the release of version 10, this has obviously been reversed. What was the idea behind the Feature Pack plan?

– I actually left my job in ICS two months before Notes 9 shipped. And I was away from the brand for three years and didn’t’ return until 2016. So, the decision to move to Feature Packs happened while I was away.

Huge costs

This is the part where we touch upon subject matters that Ed couldn’t talk about before. But now he can tell me that budgetary reasons drove the decision.

– IBM decided to invest in other areas. As a result… You know, the act of building and developing a Notes release was very expensive. You had to make sure everything was current, that it was compatible, that it could support 25 different languages, that Java was contemporary and so on. All of this was imposed on the product. So, there was a lot of non-functional technical requirements that was the base cost of shipping a Notes release.

Ed explains that just increasing the version number incurred all these IBM taxes, as he describes them, which made the product too expensive.

– So, the strategy that Jeff Schick’s team, that was in place while I was away, made was that we should just keep the version number the same and do things that are not destructive to the core code. But it was really a way around not having as much money to spend.

IBM Watson Workspace stole funding

– Did you agree with this decision? Or was it something you had to agree with, publicly?

– Ha! I don’t think I even publicly agreed with. But in that situation, it was the best possible approach, given the financial situation. On the backend, I fought very hard against the financial situation. Funding Watson Workspace competed for resources in a tight budget. It’s an interesting set of technologies, and since I use Teams every day now, I understand the benefits of that kind of collaboration. But it drew funding away from Connections and Notes/Domino. A lot of funding! Watson Workspace might become a successful product, but it hurt the other products in the process.

– Several companies that moved away from Notes told me it was because of this move. They felt IBM was abandoning the product.

– Yeah, I heard that a lot. But we were at a point where we just had to look at the options we had on the table. That we managed to ship anything at all is amazing, considering all the constraints in the IBM system. So, if the only way to ship anything at all was through Feature Packs, I think it was actually quite clever. But it did send a message to the market that there was never going to be the right kind of investment to make another new major version in the future.

It hits the fan

– The Domino community is a very passionate community…

– Ha ha, I know! And let me add that without the community these products would have been dead a long time ago. In the mid 2000s when IBM was busy with Workplace and WebSphere, the Notes community came together in a way that was special and impactful. So, I really owe everything to this community!

– Still, I’m certain you got a lot of anger thrown at you.

– Yeah.

– How did you deal with that? Do you think it was unfair, or can you see their point?

– I totally understood it! I actually tweeted this the other day, that in January 2017, me, Inhi Cho Suh, who was leading ICS at the time, and a team of people attended a strategy session. Some very, very senior people in the company were there too. We talked through our options for the collaboration business. And at that time, we were trying to see if there was a partnership that could help us in terms of taking products forward.

Selling Notes/Domino

And if that wasn’t successful, Ed suggested selling Notes/Domino. He had no buyers in mind but thought maybe they could find a company that would spend the millions of dollars needed to take the product in a new direction.

The next four months were spent trying to make a partnership works, Ed explains. He can’t say who it was, but it didn’t work.

– So, in May of 2017, we started looking at how we could get this in another position. I was actually at the user group meeting Engage in Antwerp when this was going on. During the day I was at the conference, and during the night I was on the phone, trying to negotiate on how we could do this differently.

HCL to the rescue

The situation was therefore that Ed was literally standing in front of customers during the day, trying to explain what they were doing, though the path really wasn’t clear. And then at the hotel at night, he and IBM were trying to find the path they would take.

– It was a very, very difficult time.

In the end they decided to try to find a way to sell the asset. So, they spent the months up until September trying to get a deal in place, very much like the one that is in place with HCL right now. There were four or five different companies, but Ed explains that HCL was their favorite.

– We signed the deal September 30th 2017, and announced it a few weeks later. And the deal was that HCL had to ship new versions of the product. It wasn’t a deal where they could take it over and run it into the ground. They would have to invest in the product. And then I thought: “This is really what I recommended back in January.” It’s still going to be an IBM product, but It will be built by someone willing to invest in it. And that’s a win for the market.

– We did marketing!

– So, we covered the five last years of the product, but the complaints about the lack of marketing has been going on for at least a decade. Why wasn’t IBM out there battling all the Microsoft salespeople luring customers over to Exchange and SharePoint?

– Now, this is where I’m going to be a little bit more defensive. IBM did a lot more marketing for Notes and Domino, than it did for a lot of other products. But because the Notes community doesn’t interact with a lot of other product groups from IBM, there’s not that awareness. Collaboration is an end user front of technologies, which is very unique within IBM. Almost everything else IBM makes is for IT, backend and for building infrastructure solutions.

Ed takes me back to version five, which had a ton of marketing and significant investments, according to him.

– Especially when you think about the fact that it had to be spread out for a worldwide audience. Because of this, it looks smaller than it really is. But tens of millions of dollars were spent! But to raise it to a certain level of visibility, it takes even more money.

The enemy

He compares this to Microsoft’s portfolio.

– Microsoft had their operating system, Office, SQL Server and a couple of back office things. That’s it! So, it was much easier for them to market Office. Now, to do marketing against that is expensive.

Ed says with a wink that he might one day write a book called History of Notes. And in this book, he would mention that Notes has survived even to this day, because of marketing from IBM.

– We might not have been as visible as Microsoft, but we ran events, we had web contents, we had a community, we invested in bundling and so on. So, there was a lot of stuff we did that was pretty invisible, because it was a part of IBM’s broader message and product portfolio. And it wasn’t maybe targeted at the people who were passionate about the product. But the bottom line is, we spent more on marketing than what people perceive. However, it was never going to be enough.

Ed also points out that Google doesn’t really market G Suite, Gmail, or Google Docs.

– Marketing is just one aspect. What really hurt Notes was when Microsoft started to bundle Outlook with Office and SharePoint in their Enterprise Agreements. And the CFO in the customers’ company would say: “Well, we are paying for this already, why aren’t we using it?” There’s no way to market around that. But the sheer fact that we are still talking about Notes, which is used by tens of thousands of companies, is amazing to me! We survived, because the product has value!

Mobile and cloud last?

– How do you feel about the IBM–HCL partnership? Do you think it will work?

– Yeah, I’m very excited by it. HCL demonstrated to us, during the courtship phase, that they would invest in the product, they would take the people from IBM, and even hire more and that they would ship. And they have done everything that they said they would. Even HCL Places that they are working on right now, was part of their story. They said that they were going to take this technology and see what else they could do with it.

– IBM also changed their tune when it comes to mobile first and cloud first. Now it’s on premises first.

– Well, there are so many things on the Domino server that would never work as a cloud only solution. But from what I understand, IBM is now offering you the possibility to run your applications in a cloud hybrid environment. And I think that’s a great way to solve that. I also think that the take off we had expected for cloud when that policy was put into place, didn’t happen. Verse was late and not different enough to attract people away from Microsoft or Google. So HCL said they could ship on premise code, and the customers would be happy.

Taking the blame

Ed also points out that in big markets like Germany and Japan, the jump to the cloud hasn’t been happening in the same way as in the US.

– How about the community? Do you miss it, or are you glad you’re not having to take all that sh** anymore?

– No, I do miss it. I’m going to balance this a bit now. There is a sub thread in the community that I screwed it all up. In my opinion, I’m actually the guy who made it as good as it could be, under the circumstances! With the constraints we had, we figured out the least bad option, in my opinion. But I have heard many times since I left, that it was all my fault. However, the fact that we even got to the point where we could make such a deal with HCL, was because we managed to keep the product alive.

He admits that the accusations hurt.

– It’s a scar for me, because I invested my life in this product. It’s a bit hard for me to understand how people can think that about me. I was away for three years, and there were decisions made in that time that I couldn’t control. But when I came back, I tried to do what I could to deal with the situation in the best way possible.

Ed feels his hands were tied because of the people above him.

– Look, IBM is a big, big company. And the decisions that were made at certain times, basically said: “You can’t do anything!” You are told to try and get things running for as long as possible without doing any spending, for instance. And there’s a lot of constraints in the system. Often for a good reason.

Despite being depicted as the bad guy, Ed would like to stress that he still has a lot of friends in the community, some he even talks to every day.

– But there is an element of the community where I feel like they held me responsible by title, as opposed to person. This also happened at IBM, by the way. When I left, there was an IBM colleague who said, “Thank goodness your leaving, because you’ve ruined this brand!” And I thought: “this is interesting. Why have I ruined this brand?” And everything he came back at me with, were decisions made two levels above me in the command chain. Decisions I had no influence of or control over at all. Were they decisions I would have made? Of course not.

The story isn’t over

– So, what do you think of the future of Notes and Domino?

– I mentioned to you earlier, that I’ve talked about writing a book about the history of Notes. But I would only do that when the story was over. I think there will be Notes and Domino for many, many years. Because there are no other products like this. And I won’t say this about many of the other products that I worked on, like Connections. I was in touch with the inventor of Notes, Ray Ozzie, before I left. And to think that what he and that team built… they started in 1984. I was 15 years old! And here we are, and it’s still in use in tens of thousands of companies around the globe. It’s still making hundreds of millions of dollars in money. And now it’s being opened up to all these modern interfaces and technologies. How do you predict that future?

Ed feels that if HCL stays on this course, we will be talking about the platform ten years from now.

– It may not be called Notes, it may not have the Eclipse-built UI or whatever, but the product is still going to be there!

Comments? Please join the discussion on LinkedIn.

See also:

• Will HCL Places replace IBM Notes?
• IBM Domino Applications on Cloud: A rational approach
• ALM Practices for Notes and Domino
• IBM Notes/Domino solutions

By Hogne Bø Pettersen

A lot of people are wondering why IBM Connections wasn’t part of the deal between IBM and HCL when the two companies agreed on the future of the IBM Domino product family. Personally, I think HCL Places is why they didn’t also take Connections.

HCL only teased us with HCL Places at the Engage user group meeting in May. At ICON UK in September, they showed us a full-fledged demo. The demo, which was made in cooperation with Red Pill Now, looked like this:

In short: HCL Places lets you access your newsfeed, email, calendar, chat, files, and so on. The product will also be very easy to integrate with all third-party platforms and apps that have an API.

You can comment on and like content, chat, share files, work directly with applications, and more. HCL Places also makes it easy to work with documents in your IBM Notes applications. Several people can even edit the same Notes document at the same time, as if it was an IBM Docs or Google Docs document.

This makes HCL Places a new universal messaging and collaboration client. Now, that’s what IBM Notes has always been. OK, HCL Places will give you the opportunity to do much more than the Notes client currently can, but if you are using Places, there seems to be no need for the Notes client.

And that is a signal for the changes to come. You see, HCL isn’t satisfied with just working with the existing portfolio. They will release competing products using Domino as a database platform. These products will use Domino in a completely different way from what we are used to.

At ICON UK, Jason Gary, Vice President of Engineering and Innovation at HCL, said there will be a Domino server in the future without the abbreviation IBM in front of the name. This basically means they will use the Domino platform, but they’ll use their own version of it.

HCL and IBM: Frenemies?

Some have issues with HCL’s plans, though. They fear that customers using the Domino platform and other ICS solutions will be confused. They’ve made the following arguments:

• While HCL says HCL Places is not intended to replace the Notes client, everything about it screams that’s just what such a product will do.
• This will only increase customers’ insecurities about IBM and its commitment to the platform.
• Who is the customers’ supplier: IBM or HCL?
• HCL’s role in relation to IBM will be even more muddled than some customers already perceive it to be.
• Only people “in the know” have heard about all the new stuff coming because marketing is still lacking, even though it’s better now than it has been in years.
• IBM and HCL are still telling us what’s coming, but it’s results that count.

However, those who think this is a great idea have said the following:

• Because of the huge investments HCL is making, Domino’s future has never been brighter.
• The amount of publicity and commitment to the platform is stronger than anything in almost a decade.
• Giving ICS customers even more choices on how to work with data on Domino will make complete migrations off the platform less likely.
• Using Domino as a NO SQL database will make it even easier to bring new customers onto the platform.
• HCL isn’t making products to replace IBM’s products but working towards complimenting them.
• Competition from HCL will get IBM to shape up around ICS in a way in which they haven’t for quite some time.

Hogne Bø Pettersen is a freelance writer, photographer, user trainer, and developer situated in Norway. He has worked with internet based solutions since 1990, as a professional journalist since 2000, and with IBM collaboration solutions since 1995. He likes Yes, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Star Wars.

What key responsibilities do you manage?

TH: At Xceed, I’m a senior consultant, working with customers, implementing solutions mainly based on IBM Notes/Domino and Microsoft Excel. For the Engage User Group, I organize events to bring together the community around IBM Collaboration Solutions.

What are the key challenges in a typical Notes modernization or migration project?

TH: Notes has always been an amazing platform to build efficient and secure solutions upon in a fraction of the time needed using other environments. This has not changed, even after more than 20 years. The biggest challenge we currently face is convincing customers that this is still the case.

Have you been involved in any recent development or deployment of new apps based on Notes and Domino? Can you please share any additional information?

TH: As we are currently able to run a Notes client on mobile devices, I’ve developed a Notes database that looks modern and even “cool.” This was not a customer’s project, but something I wanted to do for some time, simply to prove it can be done and that the Notes client is still a great way to produce rapid, nice solutions, without needing to use more “modern” frameworks and web tools.

Maybe with the revival of Domino V10 we’ll see more new projects coming up—either from existing customers (who are happy with Notes/Domino but don’t invest in “new” for the moment) or from brand-new customers seeing what’s possible with a limited time frame or budget.

IBM Notes—pros & cons?

TH: Pros: Speed of development, granular security, low TCO, server stability, and offline synching. Cons: perceived as “legacy” in the market.

IBM/HCL team’s intention is to “go back to the genesis of the product.” How do you interpret this intention? What are your expectations?

TH: Notes was one of the first Low-Code development environments, and it has grown into a full-fledged professional development platform. I think HCL and IBM are going for No-Code and revived Low-Code in future generations. So, I’m absolutely looking forward to that.

The biggest challenge here (and this is unrelated to Notes/Domino) is to convince the IT department or CIO that “citizen development” has its place, that it can be controlled, and that it can produce awesome results.

The Expert Profile

Theo Heselmans is a lifetime IBM Champion and a legend in the IBM Collaboration Solutions community. He is the sole person responsible for the biggest ICS user group meeting, Engage. In addition, he is a speaker at conferences, a wine lover, and a contributor well-known for his original ideas for IBM Notes solutions, both when it comes to the user interface and in terms of background coding and agents.

Source: Destination Domino | IBM

According to IBM, you can expect a 20-60% lower TCO by moving Domino applications to the IBM Cloud. If you take into account some additional benefits such as elastic scaling, reliability, and seamless updates, it is predictable that many companies will consider this option to be a smart move. In this article, we will describe how you can make it even smarter.

The appeal of the IBM’s offer lies in its simplicity. You don’t really need to redesign or modernize your apps at first. Your users can continue using the Notes client and all your classic Notes apps if you want. You can just keep working normally while taking advantage of the IBM Cloud.

With this, it may be too easy to fall into the “lift & shift” trap, that is, simply moving your entire application portfolio from your Domino servers to the IBM Cloud. IBM warns companies to sunset inactive applications instead of migrating them all to the cloud. But of course it’s up to each company to decide whether and how to do that.

The 20% Rule

An organization that has been using IBM Domino for years usually possesses a large application portfolio consisting of both active and inactive applications. The latter are normally being kept on Domino servers as read-only databases simply for occasional reference or compliance purposes.

The percentage of those databases that are read-only depends on the usage history developed in the particular Domino environment over the years and the proliferation of applications across the organization. From our experience only one out of five, or 20% of all NSF databases are active in an average organization.

Knowing this, it makes sense to take inventory of your applications and move only the active applications to the cloud and by doing so reduce your costs.

Let’s illustrate this with an example. IBM Domino Applications on Cloud is priced per application (NSF) instance: $22 per month for the Entry Edition and $38 per month for the Standard Edition.

With these rates, your total cost for 200 databases comes to approximately $90,000 per year. But if we assume that only 20% of the 200 databases are active, then you could spend as little as $12,000 per year by hosting only the active databases. Saved: $78,000 per year.

For 500 databases, the initial tally comes to $228,000 per year. But assuming again that you will only host about 20% of those databases, you can bring your annual hosting cost down to $47,000. Saved: $181,000 per year.

Clearly, your cloud TCO will greatly depend on your ability to rationalize your application portfolio. But what about the inactive databases? In our view, the data from inactive databases should be exported outside of IBM Notes and Domino and kept accessible for historical reference in open-standard formats (see IBM Notes Application Decommissioning).

You may ask: why not simply store NSFs or existing backups? The answer is Data Independence, which is an essential prerequisite for long-term archiving, compliance (see GDPR and IBM Notes Data), and information governance.

An archiving tool that makes it possible

In order to rationalize their application landscape, our customers use Seascape for Notes, a cost-efficient solution to quickly export Notes data to open-standard formats, suitable for long-term archiving.

Seascape enables you to maintain access to Notes historical data without IBM Notes and Domino. All you need to access your data is a web browser or a PDF viewer—nothing else! Seascape provides high-fidelity rendering of Notes documents and views, retaining original layout, document hierarchies, links, attachments, and metadata.

Such an archiving tool helps you decommission all Domino servers, leaving only active applications and live databases to be migrated to the cloud. And the benefit of archiving your Notes applications is unquestionable—potentially saving you hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual hosting fees.

To sum up, migrating Domino applications to the cloud is a good move. But if you first take care of your historical data and jettison the unnecessary baggage, you can move to the cloud lightly. Let us help you make the first step.

Please send us your comments or questions, or download the Seascape for Notes trial.

Our tools are fully compatible with IBM Notes and Domino V10. The test has been completed on the Beta 2 release of IBM Notes/Domino V10.

SWING PDF Converter exports individual Notes documents or collections as PDF (and optionally XML) files. It is used interactively by selecting documents and clicking the toolbar icon within a Notes application or mail database. Additionally, it can be used via API, or by triggering server-based archiving jobs.

SWING Seascape exports Notes databases (or selected parts) as portable PDF+XML or PDF+JSON archives. Its web viewer lets you look through the archive in a browser, even without a server. Finally, the SharePoint Uploader module enables the easy uploading of documents to Microsoft SharePoint or Office 365, if needed.

Do you have a specific Notes data archiving or content transformation project you would like to discuss with us? Please send us your comments or questions.

Over the last few decades, organizations have been using the conversion of Lotus Notes documents to PDF to preserve content outside of Notes and Domino. With the new release of Seascape for Notes, you can not only extract documents and views easier than ever, but you can also decide which kind of archive best suits you.

Seascape 2.0 lets you choose between three options: Full Archive, Plain Archive, and SharePoint/Office 365.

• The Full Archive converts the Notes databases to a browsable collection of PDF documents and HTML/JSON views that mirror the Notes views. The resulting archive doesn’t require any installation. It is highly portable and can be hosted locally or on a web server.
• The Plain Archive exports Notes documents as PDFs in a folder structure, with sidecar XML files to store your metadata. This option is similar to SWING PDF Converter’s output, with custom file-naming formulas.
• The SharePoint/O365 option lets you upload exported documents and metadata into your Microsoft SharePoint or Office 365 library in just a few easy steps.

For any of these options, you only need a web browser or a PDF viewer to access your extracted Notes data—nothing else!

The extraction process has been improved in this release. Now, you can choose a single or multiple Lotus Notes databases for high-volume content extraction. Our built-in conversion engine guarantees high-fidelity rendering of Notes content in PDF or PDF/A files.

Another new module is the SharePoint Uploader. If you decide to move read-only documents to Microsoft SharePoint, you can do this right away. But, you can also keep your records in a Seascape archive. And, if you decide to upload them to SharePoint or Office 365 at any time in the future, then the SharePoint Uploader will upload records from the Seascape archive, together with selected metadata.

With the latest release, Seascape for Notes remains an attractive option for organizations who want to preserve their historical data at the business-object level (as business records), retaining the entire data context: forms, views, links, and metadata.

If you would like to discuss ways to extract Notes/Domino content, please contact us. Or, sign up for the free trial and download Seascape 2.0 to your IBM Notes workstation.

What are the key challenges in a typical Notes modernization or migration project?

KDB: The key challenges that we encounter in these kinds of projects are discovering the number of applications the customer has and identifying the ones that are still relevant to the business. Luckily, there are tools on the market that can provide insights into the application usage and can help determine which applications to focus on first.

When we start a modernization project, we are usually met with a large number of fields present in a form, many of which are redundant. Therefore one of the first things we look at with the customer is whether there is a way to consolidate the fields and forms. In this way, we can develop a lighter user interface, which can lead to more clarity and keep the form clutter to a minimum.

Another challenge we come across frequently is introducing IBM Connections to customers. Not all companies are ready to start with an Enterprise Social Network, but once they discover that their Domino applications can be integrated with IBM Connections, and that they can respond to workflow messages within a status update, then they start to see the added value. The other IBM Connections features, such as Files, Meetings, Communities, Blogs, Wikis, and others, also provide extended possibilities to the customer.

Due to the methodology we employ while transforming a Domino application, we don’t really like to refer to the process as IBM Domino modernization, but rather as IBM Domino enriching.

Have you recently been involved in the development or deployment of any new apps based on Notes and Domino?

KDB: Yes, recently I was involved with the development of a new application called “Visitor Registration.” The application is based on IBM Domino and replaces the traditional notebook found on the reception desks in most companies that is used to track visitors. Our application is web based and consists of two portals: a portal for the visitor that can be shown on a tablet, and a portal for the company employees to manage their visitors. Visitors can register themselves at the desk on their own, and can easily find the names of the persons they are visiting. The internal contacts can also pre-register their visitors upfront, and add additional instructions for the receptionist, or even for the visitor.

This is just one example of a Domino-based application that we build for our clients, and we have many more new applications in the pipeline.

IBM/HCL team’s intention is to “go back to the genesis of the product.” How do you interpret this intention? What are your expectations?

KDB: The way that I read this statement is that IBM/HCL plan to promote IBM Domino as a rapid development platform that facilitates the building of secure applications that can interact with all sorts of interfaces and other platforms.

IBM Domino is ideal for this as it is a platform with state-of-the-art security, and it allows rapid development using internet protocols. There is no other platform that can offer those possibilities today.

I believe that #Domino2025 will be the moment of truth for the platform. IBM, HCL, the IBM Champions, and indeed the whole community believe in its potential. But now the time has come to convince the rest of the world to use this platform and to utilize its capabilities to start building new and powerful applications.

The Expert Profile

Kris De Bisschop is the Managing Director of GroupWave, a Belgian company delivering consulting services specialized in the IBM Collaboration Solutions portfolio. Kris is an expert in IBM Notes/Domino administration, Sametime, Traveler, and TDI and is busy with IBM Connections. He spreads the story about Social Business to customers and loves networking. He sees high-level issues as an opportunity to accept new challenges. When he is not on his computer or tablet, you can find him in the sports hall playing badminton. [Twitter, LinkedIn]

Where do you see IBM Notes/Domino in 5 years?

PW: IBM Notes/Domino is incorrectly compared to various technologies – NoSQL, other email packages etc. It’s much more than any of this, which is why customers have struggled to replace it.

The biggest strengths are as middleware for rapid development of custom workflow applications with strong security, connected or offline. Some key commitments have recently been announced, with HCL developing NodeJS modules for Domino, the knowledge to extend the vast range of APIs to performant JavaScript APIs and IBM’s desire to bring free and tiered access to the NSF in the cloud, and HCL’s commitment to both existing and new open source communities.

This could provide a strong foundation for Domino to be a competitor for existing NoSQL platforms. With every new leak of information, security becomes a more significant factor for enterprises and Domino’s ability to secure and encrypt to field level out-of-the-box is something not available in the competition. IBM, HCL and the community need to be speaking about the platform at non-IBM and non-ICS events.

Training and documentation needs to be modernised as well, possibly through open badges. But the steps being taken give scope for a new development audience and new opportunities for expanding development teams, avoiding costly migrations and loss of business application knowledge.

The future for Java developers is not as clear at this time because, rightly, emphasis at this time is on JavaScript development with Domino. But XPages can have a future and if enhancements to the underlying platform are exposed in a way Java developers can leverage. The biggest strength of XPages is the stability of the development framework. If it’s possible to move away from Dojo to jQuery as a base, that would open up a significant limitation. And by going back to the roots of the platform, there are other areas I expect the product to grow as well.

The biggest strength is the ROI of Domino. JavaScript frameworks change almost weekly. Redeveloping early Bootstrap applications in more recent Bootstrap versions isn’t just a case of upgrading an underlying framework. The same is true for applications built with Angular 1.x.

Customers who are currently bemoaning the lack of Domino developers will be singing the same tune about Bootstrap 2 or Angular 1 applications in five years’ time. Browsers, which are notoriously draconian in dropping support, may start breaking those applications. And will the framework owners or application developers bear the cost of keeping those applications working? Will the developers who built them still have the knowledge of older versions of the frameworks to support them?

I’m afraid the cost and burden will be borne by customers, with the potential for significant disillusionment with the development community and business critical applications that suddenly stop working. In the meantime, XPages applications built five years ago will, with relatively small ongoing support, still just work. Notes Client applications will also still just work.

IBM/HCL team’s intention is to “go back to the genesis of the product”. How do you interpret this intention? What are your expectations?

PW: I’m expecting this to come to market through low code development and rapid application development. The discussions at Engage brought to this a refreshing “blue-sky” approach. A platform that is a strong competitor on low code and a strong platform for “full-code” development could be a big player. Some areas would need devolving from IBM / HCL and it would require a strong partnership with open source communities. But the movements so far, although very much in their infancy, are encouraging. The key is, as always, on delivering to the expectation.

What do you think about IBM DAC (IBM Domino Applications on Cloud)? What will be the primary driver for companies to move their Domino apps to IBM Cloud?

PW: DAC finally gives an IBM-supported option for applications, as a complimentary offering for Verse in Connections Cloud. I expect IBM to be competitive on pricing, especially with HCL announcing a similar SaaS Domino offering at Engage. These offer an additional option, particularly for business partners looking to offer managed hosting for customers.

I’m not sure what the primary driver will be – the servers still need setting up and administering. DAC may be more attractive for smaller customers wanting to avoid hardware costs. Local data centres and the IBM name may also encourage some customers. But I fully expect some to stay on premises.

The announcement of an intention to offer a free / tiered offering builds for the attempt in Domino 10 to appeal to JavaScript developers outside the “yellow bubble” and is needed to compete with other NoSQL databases. It will be interesting to see if this offering and licensing allows it to finally be used as an IBM Cloud service, as developers expected to get with XPages on Bluemix.

What are your key concerns regarding GDPR and Domino data? Are you currently involved in any activities related to GDPR?

PW: I’m not heavily involved in GDPR, but it’s predominantly about processes not platforms. And any companies who have tried to make a business out of claiming Domino can’t support GDPR are just scaremongering. Anyone who knows anything about Domino knows that of course it’s possible to search any NSF and find information relating to an individual and remove or anonymise it. How it’s done and how easily are a different matter. But a company with competent developers and a good understanding of their Domino servers can address any requirements.

How successful are organizations today in managing the application life cycle across their complex application portfolios, including Notes and Domino applications?

PW: I’m not sure if I have the level of exposure to judge that. Notes Client or traditional Domino web applications still have some issues around round-tripping that affect use of source control. But source control is standard in my XPages applications, OSGi plugins etc.

Automated testing and building is an area I think most Domino developers do not have skills in and I’m not sure whether larger organisations try to cross-pollenate those skills – it requires good knowledge on both sides. There is limited blogging on it.

I’ve used JIRA and GitHub issues for issue tracking and task management for a while, but I’m not sure how widely the knowledge is. There is a degree of upskilling required for developers for all these areas and some NotesIn9 and other videos already available. It’s an area a number of people are aware of and have a desire to address. But it also needs a commitment from developers and companies to want to learn. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink!

What are your main responsibilities at Intec?

PW: Intec has a broad focus across ICS, including Kenexa. My work is around development services. Historically this has concentrated on IBM Domino, but has spread into Connections, Watson and beyond into other development aspects like Websphere Liberty Profile (now open sourced as OpenLiberty), Vaadin, NodeJS, Node-RED and more.

The Expert Profile

Paul Withers is an IBM Lifetime Champion, has been an OpenNTF Board Member since 2013, has worked with Domino since R4.5, XPages since 2009, co-authored XPages Extension Library and was technical editor for Mastering XPages 2nd Edition. He is one of the developers on OpenNTF Domino API as well as contributor to a variety of other OpenNTF projects. For full bio, see https://paulswithers.github.io/professional/

Recent discussions about GDPR have brought to our attention topics such as data portability and data formats. According to the regulations, we should be able to extract personal data such as customer records and customer correspondence in a commonly used electronic format. So, what is the preferable format for extracting emails? Undoubtedly, EML and PDF are prime candidates.

Which one of these should you be using though? Essentially, both formats preserve the content of an email fully, so in that sense they are equal. However, when you think about how the archived content will be used after the extraction has been completed, then the two formats begin to diverge in their versatility.

You may want to export your emails to EML format if you’re planning on importing them back into your email client at some point. However, if you’re exporting the emails only to generate records to be delivered to a third party, then PDF becomes a much better choice.

The reasons are that PDFs can be opened natively in every modern browser and also PDF readers are as ubiquitous as web browsers. So, when you send a PDF to someone, they will likely have no problems opening it whatsoever.

On top of that, the PDF format has the edge on EML based on a few other grounds too.

“Although counter-intuitive to HTML-oriented developers, PDF’s unique feature-set make the format ideal for archiving email and ‘case files’—arbitrary collections of content,” stated Duff Johnson, the executive director of the PDF Association and a veteran of the electronic document space. “PDF pages and XMP metadata, together with the other enabling features of the Portable Document Format, offer a practical and vendor-neutral, fully interoperable solution to archiving email and other static electronic content.”

This ability to store collections of related content (with its full rendering) and data makes PDF the best option for record retention. PDFs are a perfect fit for turning relevant emails into business records. J. Kevin Parker, the president of NCC-AIIM stated: “Is there a preferable format for long-term preservation? […] This is something a manager or attorney or other human person can point to and see meaning.”

As a practical example of how the PDF format works best for email archiving, let’s consider the Canadian Health and Social Services Center (CIUSSS), which recently was looking for a way to extract email records from IBM Domino servers.

Philippe Preville, the IT manager at CIUSSS, said that they had considered various alternatives and formats but most of them fell short in one respect or another. Finally, they opted to export their data to PDF, which guaranteed the best adoption rate by users and satisfied all of their long-term archiving requirements. Since then, CIUSSS had deployed the PDF Converter for Notes add-on to about 1,000 users across 15 locations.

So in the end, the question becomes not whether you should export your emails to PDF, but rather how you should go about it, depending on what email platform your organization uses.

PDF Tools for Microsoft Outlook and IBM Notes/Domino

If you would like to discuss ways to turn email messages into e-records, please contact the SWING Software team. Or, check out our solutions for content transformation and data portability.

Are you currently involved in any activities related to GDPR? What are your key concerns regarding GDPR and Domino data?

BM: Great question! I had the chance to dive into the GDPR and what it means for Domino when I was preparing for a recent Ytria webinar where we offered strategies for our customer base (500+ companies across 45 countries) to take the necessary steps to become compliant.

The whole subject is gigantic, but here’s what I would highlight:

The good: Domino is extremely secure. The last serious public exploit came out over 6 years ago, and none of the recent, high-profile breaches involved Domino as a data container—that means, consequently, that personal data stored in Domino NSFs is also secure.

The bad: Domino lacks the native e-discovery and enterprise domain search capabilities required to easily comply with DSRs (Data Subject Requests). While there are ISVs with solutions to help, making Notes applications easily searchable is tricky due to their data structure flexibility: a price we pay for being NoSQL. I’m really hoping the IBM/HCL team will address this area in the upcoming Domino v10 release.

The Notes client – pros & cons?

BM: Just like most of the users we talk to, I personally also love the Notes client. However, I do believe that the ability to better mobilize/webify Notes application data, as well as make that data available via various APIs, is vital. That’s why I’m so excited about the Node integration capabilities coming in Domino v10: with Node being one of the most popular development environments out there, this addition will bring a whole new generation of developers to the Domino ecosystem.

Because the majority of Domino users are most familiar with the full Notes client, I believe a lighter, more modern looking mail client would also be a welcome new development.

IBM/HCL team’s intention is to “go back to the genesis of the product” How do you interpret this intention? What are your expectations?

BM: I love that mission statement! In fact, when I quoted that sentence during the V10 preview call on Twitter, the activity around it was incredible :)

My view is that going back to the “genesis/core” of the product means building and marketing it as a secure, powerful, and unparalleled NoSQL application platform, with RAD (Rapid Application Development) being one of its greatest qualities.

While I’m sure everyone in the ICS space has heard stories like this, here’s one I’d like to share: a Ytria ambassador, who’s also a developer, told us that his company needed to build a solution to connect to a 3rd-party HR software tool and pull in and process some data for HR purposes. The company decided not to pursue a solution in Notes—although they are a huge Domino shop—and tasked a vendor to create the solution in .Net. After half a year and USD $1,5M burnt, the solution still didn’t work as it was supposed to. So, they built it using Notes in 1.5 weeks, and for only $10,000. Those are the kinds of stories that, to me, show the core power of this product.

What are the key challenges in a typical Notes/Domino modernization or migration project? Do you think that preservation of existing Notes content is properly addressed?

BM: I don’t believe that the main challenges lie in actual design elements or their look and feel because each platform will use a different interface to take input and manage data. Having said that, I find other platforms really lack the ability of Notes views to display and search through hundreds of thousands of documents without breaking a sweat. You don’t have that kind of power if you work with SharePoint views, for example.

My experience is that although sometimes tricky, the greatest challenge isn’t migrating the data itself, especially with solutions like SWING Software’s archiving solutions to help. The challenge, in my opinion, lies in replicating business processes that we are used to in Domino. We are used to coding 10-15 stage workflows within a few days using Notes, and these complex solutions can easily take 10x the amount of time and resources in other platforms.

The Expert Profile

As Head of Products at Ytria, Ben Menesi oversees the strategic direction of product development for Ytria’s IBM and Microsoft product lines. Ben is a regular speaker at industry conferences from IBM Connect to Engage UG, MWLUG/CollabSphere to Microsoft’s SharePoint Saturdays worldwide. His acclaimed presentations cover topics such as Domino and Microsoft administration & enterprise security, and he has been named IBM Champion for collaboration for the past 5 consecutive years.