Information Systems:Limitations to IBM/Lotus Notes

This article is highly opinionated. Frankly, it's hard to have restraint when talking about Notes.

Overview

At uniPHARM, Domino/Notes is used for email, calendaring, contacts, and rooms/resource management (reserving rooms for meetings).

The IBM (Lotus) Domino/Notes platform - to put it nicely - does not have a great reputation. While there are still companies that continue to use this software, I am willing to bet that the rate of new setups is near-zero (e.g. no new companies that are looking for an email platform are buying into this platform). This page is not a recommendation for migration off of the Domino platform, but rather a discussion of its limitations. (Over time, I strongly suspect these will become one and the same anyway.-norwizzle (talk) 16:40, 26 September 2017 (PDT))

Limitations

• Unnecessarily hosted on our single, critical business server

• What initially was a good idea (because we got more utility from a very expensive server by also using it to do email), is now perhaps no longer one.
• Bart, the Power8 server (and its predecessors), was acquired to run an ERP. It is built to run business logic, calculations, and database operations. It makes less sense using a Power server to run a compute- and memory-intensive app server (Domino). Process UPDALL taking up 80% of resources allocated to userspace and that's ok? We're just lucky the IBM i has excellent processor/memory management.
• Our system has 2TB of capacity, with around 1.6-1.8TB of that usable. There is not a lot of room to spare, and because of space-saving considerations, we have staff members with 300MB mail files. You can sign up for a free Gmail account and instantly get 15GB. Even if you were to expand the mail file of all users to 5GB, at 50 users, that is 250GB, or 14% of precious system disk space allocated to mail files. That does not include the space that Domino itself takes up, or the performance hit the application takes on the system. Sure, ours is a powerful system that can handle Domino load - but why do we have to insist on continuing to do it this way when the million other ways we can do mail mean we don't have to? What benefit does hosting it on the Power8 have exactly? So we're going to virtualize x86 and make shareholder mail on MDaemon redundant for host-failure, but staff mail still has to go down when we do maintenance on the i?
• The Power8 is resilient, but redundancy/uptime does not hold a candle to that of a typical email provider.

• Domino is a bloated application server.

• The reason some companies find it too difficult to migrate off of Domino is that they actually have a lot of applications developed within it. We just use it for email and calendar (which themselves are actually apps, but stock ones). Domino is an application runtime - you can develop apps within it, sort of like WebSmart. E.g. a SharePoint/wiki type app, workflow apps - Miles said Anisoft even uses it for invoicing! It even has its own language (LotusScript), and its own way of doing databases. Domino may be justifiable if we had invested in developing software with it (thankfully we didn't go down that road). Email and calendar are arguably much easier to migrate. Heck, modern email services even have migration tools to import existing mail.

• Proprietary mail server structure necessitating a separate mail server software (MDaemon) as a gateway for inbound/outbound external mail. Domino mail routing is proprietary, while 99% of other email uses the common protocols POP, IMAP and SMTP. I think Domino can also do SMTP and serve as a one-stop-shop for all uniPHARM email needs, except we have 350+ shareholder/staff mail accounts in MDaemon, so to migrate these to Domino would shoot up the cost. So with Domino, we will always need some other software to do email. Again, why?

• Granted, moving all email (shareholders and staff) to cloud mail would also be pricy. Instead,
• Proprietary directory structure also means that Domino groups (Customer Service, IT Group etc.) have to be translated, and a lot of times this leads to errors with replies e.g. someone sends to abc@outside.com and cc's IT Group. When the outside sender replies back, their mail client will not recognize IT Group and try to send back to something non-existent like IT%Group@unipharm.com and error out.

• Issues with function and usability, particularly with the desktop client (Notes), and Domino administration client. Countless issues.

• Large chunks of people's mail being deleted when they claim they did not actively do so.
• Random reports of mail not being delivered.
• Domino mail router sending mail to the wrong contact when another was clearly selected.
• Search function - people looking for an email - the email is clearly there, but doesn't turn up in search. The mail file is indexed. ???
• But when it comes to Lotus mail - it's always the user's fault right?

• Burden of administration

• Fixpacks...to do email...for 50 users. Doesn't compute.
• Having to compact people's mail file to save space.
• Notes maintains local files for each user on every computer. If something goes wrong, client-side investigation has to be part of troubleshooting. Mail access should be done through thin-clients (mobile apps, web browsers). Outlook is also a desktop application and has its share of glitchiness, but it is not Notes.

• Cost

• It almost works against the entire argument listing this as a limitation, because usually cost is considered when there is parity amongst all alternatives with regards to other criteria.
• We pay a hefty maintenance fee to IBM to support this software. Do you call Gmail or iCloud because your email doesn't work? No, because email always works. PMRs because of issues setting up a new user or issues with groups. Seriously? There is such a thing as a Domino administrator. There is no such thing as a G Suite / Office 365 administrator (whether a certification or a job specialty). Both do email. Go figure that one out.
• Also, CAL-based licensing means the support fee goes up with increased number of users.
• Again, the cost is justified if we get more out of the software. Are we using Domino as an authentication backend? No. Are we using Domino database to house data? project collaboration tools? No. Are we using Sametime for video/messaging/presence? No.
• Going with something like Office 365 or G Suite (Google Apps for Work) is also per-user and will be an ongoing cost (so it's hardly cheap), but it is bundled with other services. Cloud storage, a subscription to the latest Microsoft Office and browser versions of Microsoft OFfice apps (in the case of OFfice 365), mail archiving, built-in spam filter services (no more Barracuda).

Pros of Domino/Notes

LOL. But really, there are a few pros, I guess. And the term 'pro' in this situation refers more to a reason to continue using the platform, not something that the platform does exceptionally well (because it does nothing exceptionally well).

• The mobile device management implementation (through Traveler) is decent - just enough features to secure mobile access to email while not overtaking control of the device. Verse containerization is nice.

• However, Google G Suite and Microsoft Office 365 have MDM features as well.

• People are used to it. Great reason. The single most important criterion by which all IT decisions should be made.
• Change is hard. Another great reason.
• There are no issues 98% of the time. Try applying this same standard to other email services and see if it holds up as being a 'pro'.
• And...crickets...