Real World Computing

I've been meaning to write this post for at least a year but these days I'm always too busy for blogging. Last year, we embarked on a project in which we wanted to regularly exchange data between Domino and a SQL server database on Azure.  We looked at several third party options before realizing that HCL Domino had what we needed built-in and out of the box - even better, HCL also had a "codeless" solution (Foundry) available to us to do the whole transfer.  This post will most likely be the first part of a series that covers the REST API and a bit of Foundry. I'm no expert on either but there's not a lot of information out there so anything is better than nothing.  Prepping the Environment Before embarking on our API journey, we upgraded our servers to Domino 12.0.2. It's something of a sore point with me that people think that it's fine to leave Domino on much older versions, for example, release 9. It isn't. Old versions of any software have se...

 If you'd told me back in 2018 that I'd be attending a Domino Jam in 2022, I wouldn't have believed you - and yet, that's exactly what happened.  Even more incredibly, I left the jam feeling reinvigorated and excited for the future of this 30+ year old system. I've talked before about how our departure from the platform was fueled by largely emotional reactions to the dated mail UI and a resistance to change for new users unused to anything but Microsoft Outlook. We picked the low hanging fruit (mail migration to outlook) and we also tried converting a more complex system.  See:  New Year, New Directions (January 2017) Our Domino State of Play 2022 (February 2022) Far from abandonment, our strategy for moving to Azure demonstrated the versatility, reliability, security and ROI of domino and resulted in recognition of its value as a platform and an abrupt U-turn in our strategy.  Fresh out of the Sydney Domino Jam, I want to talk about some of the revelations f...

It's been five years since a decision was made to kill Notes and Domino at our organisation. Like many other organisations, we left for the Azure shores of Microsoft. Several changes of leadership later and Domino is still at the heart of our organisation and we're moving towards tighter integration with it than ever.  It occurred to me that now is as good a time as any to reflect on how our journey went.  The Low Hanging Fruit The low hanging fruit of any domino migration is mail. Email is an easily identifiable application which can generally be swapped out one-for-one. In our case, Notes client (and the lesser used Verse web application) for Outlook and Outlook Web Application (OWA).  We investigated several applications before finding one that worked and converted all of our .NSF mail files into .PSTs, then we imported these into outlook. Along the way, we discovered that Verse didn't safeguard our older mail quite as well as we'd hoped and we discovered that folder...