back to article HCL to end all support for old versions of Notes and Domino in 2024

HCL has given users of versions 9.x and 10.x of its Domino groupware platform two years warning that they'll have to upgrade or live without support. Domino started life as Lotus Notes before IBM bought the company and milked the groupware platform for decades then offloaded it to India's HCL in 2018. HCL has since released …

  1. jake Silver badge

    What took 'em?

    I ended all support for Lotus products in late '94. Haven't missed it a bit.

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "HCL promises upgrades are now easy"

    They've been easy for a long time, development-wise. Heck, all the @functions from R3 (and probably from R1) are still there.

    Notes/Domino has a long-established history of backwards compatibility, as far as developers are concerned. If you go to OpenNTF, you'll find plenty of apps written before R9 that still work. Maysoft has the Notes Document Viewer since forever (well, their copyright states 2002), and it is an extremely handy tool that I use regularly on R9 and R10 platforms. I'm sure it'll work fine on R12.

    From a developer's perspective, I don't see what the problem is.

    Of course, admins might have a different perspective, but I don't see that updating from R9 to R10 made any great difficulties in the companies I work with.

    This announcement is just to remind Domino users that R9 is end-of-support. Well, okay then, but it won't prevent people from running their servers, no more than Windows XP has stopped running (and running, and running).

    That said, R12 seems quite interesting, but obviously jumping from R9 to R12 is going to be a bit of a hassle.

    1. Kevin Johnston

      Re: "HCL promises upgrades are now easy"

      The new features in V11 and more significantly V12 make the upgrade a no-brainer. The security improvements are dramatic with much stronger keys available and V12 is very much intended for cloud. HCL have even managed to get the web-browser based client working that IBM tried and failed with back in the V8.5 days so that removes the Notes client element which people always pointed to as showing how dated the product was.

      Lot of people claim that product X or Y is better than Notes but none of them can do all the stuff that Notes still can and by the time you have rolled out the 7 or 8 products to pick up all the stuff you used to do in Notes you find yourself paying out treble the cost for license and hardware if not more.

      Meh, not the first time that a good sales team has caused people to abandon what is a more effective offering (no, Exchange cannot do everything Notes can...never could and never will even in it's O365 clothing)

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

        Re: none of them can do all the stuff that Notes still can

        I still remember the IT director of an important Luxembourg company (which I will not disclose, obviously), who told me that, when they were looking to replace a mainframe (sorry, don't have the details), they asked Microsoft for a quote.

        The answer ? 50 NT servers.

        50.

        If that doesn't boggle your mind, I don't know what will.

        The result ? They went with a Solaris server and Domino 4 (yeah, that's how old this is).

        I have to say, I hate IBM. They had a great product, with incredible abilities, and they never approached the Fortune 1000 to explain just how indispensable Notes is.

        Just my 2 cents, as we say these days.

        1. Scott 26
          Thumb Up

          Re: none of them can do all the stuff that Notes still can

          Domino (the server) was great - the ability to do stuff that would take MS dozens of server to replicate (Sharepoint... shudder!)

          What killed was Notes (the client).... the client was unlike anything else on the user's desktop - and unfamilairty = bad.

          (But if you were to view teh client like it's own little ecosystem, it actually made a lot of sense - but that was ok for savvy users, not so good for the other 99%)

          (It's been a good 1.5 decades since I had dealings with Domino/Notes, so my recollections must be slightly nostalgia-tinted)

      2. Auntie Dix

        Re: "HCL promises upgrades are now easy"

        If Notes has been truly reborn, why isn't word of mouth bringing it worldwide recognition?

        With such a great product, why isn't HCL seen as a new software leader?

        I have my doubts, and those who supported Notes, their nightmare memories.

    2. Outski

      Re: "HCL promises upgrades are now easy"

      obviously jumping from R9 to R12 is going to be a bit of a hassle.

      We went from 9 to 11 in our legacy environment last year (we migrated to Exchange a couple of years back) - an absolute doddle.

  3. tip pc Silver badge

    Hidden in the bowels

    It’s interesting how many older businesses still have notes beating somewhere in the basement.

    Barely anyone knows anything about it and barely anyone touches it but it’s somehow pivotal to how the whole business operates.

    Just leave it alone and occasionally check it’s hardware is happy and all will be well.

    Just ask the longest serving competent IT person if your organisation has notes running somewhere.

    1. Auntie Dix
      Mushroom

      Re: Hidden in the bowels

      That's like asking, "Do you have herpes?"

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ahh yes - the joy of Notes.

    For some odd reason, my Notes sessions would randomly fail. Some odd server somewhere had not updated a password for something. No idea what it was. No idea what it was needed for. Never could get anyone to fix it.

    What is really funny is that this was during my tenure at Big Blue whilst they still owned/supported Notes....

    1. Julian 8 Silver badge

      IBM had no clue about Notes internally so I am not surprised

      I worked for a company where we had a large Notes infrastructure and TUPE'd across.

      I was intruged to see what they had done to the email client as OOB it is shite, and we did a lot of modifications to ours. IBM rolled out the OOB one.

      Also a number of colleagues had issues post migration that I identified in seconds saying "it is this, that or the other". Took their teams seconds to dismiss my comments, but a few weeks to fix the broken users and all were the comments we said.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        This is nothing unusual.

        IBM has a record of getting rid of the very people they need to support customers (and themselves) with IBM products (lots of different ones, not just Notes), and end up having to go out to the contract market just to service their customer commitments. I work with AIX, and the lack of knowledge about AIX remaining in IBM is astounding!

        It's all very well getting young people in at lower salaries, but these youngsters just aren't interested in learning about products whose end is in sight, and who would blame them!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IBM's migration from Notes!

    IBM's own migration from Domino and Notes progresses.

    The switch to Exchange and Web Outlook and the Apple and Windows clients was pushed through very quickly at the beginning of April, and at the time, people were told "There's no official path to extract your mails from Notes databases, don't use a non-approved tool, but don't worry, an official tool is coming". This has been driven from the very top in IBM, and it really looks like someone high up was desperate to prove IBM's cloud credentials by moving the internal mail service as quick as they could.

    Well, we're three months in, and people who are getting workstation refreshes keep asking for the official tool, while struggling to install old Notes clients on their new workstation to retain access to their old mails. And don't talk about team rooms! Team room owners are being told to migrate content to Box right now, without being given any guides how to do it.

    Notes applications (which were still in use right up to the migration) are pretty much history as well, as they often need mails to be handled by Notes, not Outlook. There are exceptions for Notes users who have a regulatory reason for their mail to be only stored in the UK. They have a stay of execution while a mechanism to do that with Exchange in the Cloud is worked out (really, you would have thought someone would have considered this before firing the starting pistol)

    There are a number of people on the forums who I can tell are getting really tired and stressed about the lack of support from the project. The same questions get asked again and again, and the same condescending non-answers are dropped in by the forum 'bots over and over.

    At least they've allowed the Linux workstation community in IBM to come up with an official way of configuring Evolution so we're not stuck with the horrible Web interface!

  6. Somone Unimportant

    Trying to get Domino/Notes information from HCL...

    ...is like pulling teeth!

    I've a client who is running Domino 4.5 circa 1996, with an application of similar vintage. An application that puts through over $50 million worth of finance business (loans, leases etc) per year.

    And before you ask, they are running Exchange separately for eMail...

    It is rock solid, but needs a Windows 2000 VM to run on - not something nice in this modern day and age - and the only time it has become unusable was when the original Domino certificate expired. It had been set for a 25 year expiry in 1996, so expired in 2021. I renewed it... for 99 years, so next time it expires it won't be my problem!

    So I want to upgrade it to something that can be run on newer operating systems, as well as provide better access to the users. But trying to engage HCL (at least here in Australia) is proving difficult, if not impossible.

    If anyone has any contacts at HCL, particularly in the Asia/Pacific region, I'd love to speak with them...

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

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