For many people Notes and Domino is just a mail program that was used years ago. But that is nothing more than a misconception generated by an excellent marketing campaign by Microsoft that said for decades «Lotus Notes is dead», since Domino was its main competitor in that market, but also because for years, IBM only promoted that side of the technology. Email. but Microsoft and those who believed its message never really understood the product.

Saying that Domino is a mail server is like saying that SAP is a mail server just because it has an SMTP engine. Domino, now called HCL Domino, is a powerful document management server that turned out to have a very good mail engine, but its power lies in document management and work flow, not Email.

A product that is more than thirty years old, and that for the last twenty years has had a security system based on electronic signatures which makes it one of the few computer systems that, if properly installed and configured, has never been hacked. Very few can say the same and its worst enemy, Microsoft, after decades still has security problems. Now in its Office365.

Sometimes I have come across people who consider it a very old product, outdated, they say. But normally they are using a version that is more than ten years old. Which shows the robustness of the product, but obviously the aspect and the technology gets old if you don’t upgrade.

Since version 8 (we are already at version 12), it is possible to update the entire interface of any Domino application in such a way that it has a useful and modern appearance when used from mobile devices, tablets or web browsers, without touching the original data. This path that IBM started is now being strongly pushed by HCL. The truth is that I haven’t seen this energy and desire to improve the product without losing its security and robustness since the years of the original Lotus Notes.

Domino / Notes continues to advance and it is highly recommended to stay on the latest version. If you are one of those companies that do not want to maintain their own servers and believe in the «cloud» concept, Domino can still work perfectly well. A layer of Xpages, Appdevpack or Volt is added to the applications. and you have all your data in a safe place, without the need to have the servers in your offices and saving a lot of money in those migrations to other environments that promise you everything, but rarely succeed… migrations that turn into nightmares when, apart from migrating your mail, you also have to migrate your document management side of Domino.

In case of any doubts or questions about Domino, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.