What's wrong with Lotus Notes / Lotus Domino

Question

I have a client who is using Lotus Domino for their web application/server platform. The client has two "web developers" who are more comfortable with Lotus Domino than more mainstream tools and technologies and are not enthusiastic about making a switch. I have been asked to provide an assessment of why it may be prudent to migrate to a different web application platform.

I would be particularly interested in understanding deficiencies related to the platform as I have very little knowledge of Domino but am very familiar with other platforms.

In addition to the fact that Apache has over 70% of web server market, IIS over 21%, and Lotus almost 0%, what other reasons would you give for moving away from this platform?

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

The only thing wrong with Lotus Domino is that it's a distributed database which didn't sell, so they decided it would make a good email platform.

The user interface for the email platform was odd, partially because email isn't really built on a distributed database architecture, it's a client-server architecture. Due to it's distributed database underpinnings, it was possible to better manage email (especially when it came to email retention rules). That actually made problems worse for the majority of users, because now they had something called email, that somewhat looked like email, and acted quite different than email.

I would be cautious about moving away from a Lotus platform. Odds are excellent that there is something behind the covers that made the Lotus platform desirable. Remember that while Apache has 70% of the web server market, they have 0% of the distributed database market. If you know 100% that there's not a single bit of distributed database (or even non-distributed database) dependency, then it's a safe move. Odds are it's not.

Answer 2

Biggest issue is the ever-decreasing market share. There just isn't enough interest in the platform anymore and it can't compete in the email market against Exchange. Eventually it will disappear and there's no point building on top of an infrastructure that's bound to collapse.

Maybe you can convince the developers to move away slowly by using another technology in tandem with Domino. I found that necessary after my company switched from Notes to Exchange email, but was left with dozens of Notes applications still in use. One simple trick is to expose Notes data using XML or the NotesSQL driver. It's very easy to pull that data into an ASP.NET application, or some other platform better suited to Web development than Domino.

Even if they love working with Notes, unless they plan to retire in 10 years they'd better start learning some new technologies anyway.