Lotus Notes and Domino databases have been used in some of the biggest corporations in the world for years. The two systems are able to allow companies to manage their information in a very cost-effective way. Traditionally, Lotus Notes and Domino have been used for accounting purposes. They were created by engineers who combined the strengths of both an ordinary database and a financial one. There are two main areas where Lotus Notes and Domino excel: their ability to organize large amounts of information and their ability to make this information easily accessible to any member of staff.
In this final phase of migration planning, IT teams are likely to look at the applications of Lotus Notes and Domino in a whole new way. In many ways, the two systems are at the heart of many businesses: as tools for storing and sharing information, as reference information, and as workflow systems. If they can be effectively integrated into an enterprise architecture, Lotus Notes and Domino can work even more efficiently at saving time and improving productivity.
This is where Lotus Notes really excels. It allows users to create tables and lists, and has powerful features such as conditional opening, hiding data from view and deletion, hiding data from view and creation, and more. It has several options for working with multiple objects and has an extensive range of functions, including auto sorting and calculations. The general manager can also view all the tables in the database in one consolidated view.
Of course, Lotus Notes is not just a list application. It is able to store large amounts of data and can be used for complex activities such as document scanning and image manipulation. The great strength of this application is that it is simple enough for anyone to use, yet it has a wide range of features including encryption and password protection. However, in this write up, we shall discuss some of the current marketplace trends related to migration and the challenges associated with the design of the Lotus Notes application.
To start with, there is a great need for migration pilot tests. Such tests can help find out whether the application is well designed for database migration. The Lotus Notes is currently building using the Oracle 9i database platform. With this database, it makes sense for the company to migrate from the current Oracle environment to Lotus Notes. This project has several phases: Analyzing the current scenario, migration readiness analysis and migration master plan. These are important in each phase of the project.
In analyzing the current scenario, the evaluation will look at the change management requirements and financial implications of the migration. Next, migration readiness analysis will look at the data need of users and the existing setups. This is an important phase because it identifies the challenges that users might face while migrating databases from existing Oracle based systems to Lotus Notes. Migration master plan involves the identification of the new product and its integration with the rest of the applications in the company. Based on the data needs of users, the migration strategy should be developed and validated.
In migration preparation, the next key discussion points are data model, data sources, application logic and user interface. Since Lotus Notes is using the Active Server Page (ASP) approach to create web-based databases, the SQL scripts used to build the data models of the application have to be compatible with the established programming interfaces of Lotus Notes such as INTCACER_ROW_ID, ITP_ROWID and ODBC_ROWID. These are the same interfaces that are used in other enterprise wide databases like Microsoft Access and MS SQL. Similarly, the application logic has to be same as that of the current versions of the client software like Microsoft Access or Lotus Notes.
The final phase of this migration process is known as the content migration. This is the phase in which the source data of the Lotus Notes, i.e., the images and drawings, are organized and transferred to the Lotus Notebook document database. The content migration requires developers to take care of the differences between various screen formats and their display settings. It is recommended to work with migration consultant to make sure that the final result is well designed and created according to current market trends.
