It's been a long while since I've posted on this blog. It's not because there's no domino news. There is heaps of domino news and it's been coming in leaps and bounds. If anything, the lack of posts indicates that life has gotten busier than ever.
Over the weekend, there was a question on Domino on Facebook which I felt needed answering - have I mentioned Domino on Facebook before? Try some of these groups:
I'm sure there are plenty of others.
Anyway, the question was on exchanging Domino data and I mentioned the REST API. My original intention was to cover it in this post but I've decided to use this post to catch you all up on where we are with Domino first.
Domino Not Notes
We don't generally talk about Notes at work. We try not to create new Notes accounts but we still have to because we have one key (widely used) system that is still notes driven.
Don't get me wrong. We tried Nomad, which is excellent by the way but this particular system was simply too tied to Notes to work well enough on Nomad.
Instead of worrying about trying to get Nomad working well for one Notes system, we're planning on webifying it so that we can use it entirely on Domino. Notes, we think, should be for admins rather than users.
Our Versions
I'm currently running the 64 bit Notes 14 client and our servers are currently 12.0.2 FP2. We'll be moving to 14 around mid 2024.
One thing that really frustrates me is when people complain about Notes but then tell me that they're using version 9 or 6 or gasp... 4. I think I'd be pretty miffed if I was forced to use Word 95 too. If you're not going to keep domino up to date, then I don't have to listen to your complaints.
We have security systems which add no actual business value (merely protection) that cost more than the corporate Domino licenses. It's well worth the money and don't forget that an unpatched or unsupported system is a insecure system. Keep it updated.
The Microsoft World
We moved over to Outlook in 2017 and I don't regret the move. It's funny but we get just as many, perhaps more, complaints about email and calendar now as we did during the Notes days. The difference is that people are complaining about Microsoft now. I'm fine with that. They're still using domino apps every single day but they don't complain about them. Those are stable, secure and aren't constantly being changed by sources outside of our control.
We use Teams instead of Sametime. Again, it's a massive source of complaints and I'm happy that those are not directed at Domino. People will complain about those things regardless of the platform.
What's interesting is that although we're using SharePoint for file storage. We've discovered that it isn't very good for file sharing externally. There are some amazing holes in the way that SharePoint "shares" files. It's permissive rather than restrictive by default meaning that you can send links to people and Office 365 will automatically widen the security to let those people in -- even if you send it to the wrong person.
We still do most of our sharing with external parties via Domino and even the people who moved to SharePoint and teams have started to come back to Domino for sharing.
Applications and Sync
The last thing I wanted to touch on was "applications". This is quite interesting and I'll cover it in more detail in a later post. We tried using Microsoft's approach with things like Azure, which is incredibly costly - somewhere in the order of about 10x the costs of Domino, not just in development but also in ongoing maintenance, particularly in trying to keep frameworks up to date.
We also tried Cheaper alternatives, like PowerApps and Forms with PowerAutomate. Both of these failed miserably because Microsoft keeps changing the underlying systems and because the power and flexibility that we need simply isn't there - or isn't reliable.
What we have done though, is adopted a very Microsoft look and feel in our web apps. We're using Microsoft UI standards and Microsoft terminology and this I think makes our users feel more at home. It also helps them seamlessly switch between Office 365 and Domino applications.
We're exchanging data back and forth between the Microsoft systems and the Domino systems using various different methods. We've tried PowerShell (for address book sync), JSON Web Tokens (to redirect authenticated users) and we've tried the REST API in Domino to sync data between SQL and Domino via HCL's excellent Foundry product. All of these methods have been very effective.
We haven't got onboard with VoltMX yet though we've shown a bit of interest in that space. I think our real issue there is simply that we don't have the time or resources to go there yet -- but it looks very promising. For us... It's enough that Domino is back in the core of our business systems, where it belongs.
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