You just can’t get the staff, you know

Fifteen years ago, ‘Lotus Notes’ was the hot ticket. There were countless IT service companies offering software development services to create application after application on Notes. In some cases, when the only tool you have is a hammer, and everything looks like a nail, the applications didn’t pass the test of time. But for many others, the application — probably amended, enhanced and extended way beyond its original concept — still survives as the bedrock of your business.

But… there are no longer countless IT companies offering the right skills. In fact, some might say that the pool of available skilled people — both developers and infrastructure experts — is slowly but surely drying up. The risks of doing nothing are, well, risky.

With LDC Via, you are not restricted to just those skilled with IBM’s Domino Designer client. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find yourself restricted at all. LDC Via’s comprehensive APIs are all REST-based, so you can pick the development tools and approaches that suit you: .NET, PHP, MEAN stack, Ruby, Python, Java, even XPages — whatever floats your boat.

Liberate your data, and liberate your developers at the same time. LDC Via.

It's a monster

You’re happy and committed to Domino, so you definitely don’t need LDC Via, right? Well, not necessarily.

Domino has always had challenges with scalability. The theoretical/technical limits have increased over the years, and there are all manner of tips ’n’ tricks to make your applications scale. Ultimately, however, there are some limitations in the venerable platform, and it is not the right long-term solution for every application. Or perhaps it was a good choice ten years ago, but with 10x as many users and 100x as much data, it’s struggling.

In fact, the mark of a successful Domino application is one that has lasted years and become overloaded with documents. Why not give the old application a new lease of life? Move historical data off to a platform like LDC Via, where it’s no longer a load on your servers, and let your Domino application’s view indices breathe once more.

Get in touch, and we’ll see what we can do. We think you’ll be pleased.

Home sweet home

One of the main uses for LDC Via is in re-homing historical data from servers that are being retired.

Your organisation may find itself in the situation where it is maintaining, supporting, and backing up Domino infrastructure purely so that the user can reference historical data held thereon — no new development, no real activity, few if any data updates … but you still need to “keep the lights on”.

Even worse — and the longer you carry on the more likely this is — these servers may be poorly-supported, may not have robust back-up, and can even be running out-dated or un-patched infrastructure.

So why not kick those boxes into touch and serve up your data in a modern, cost-effective manner (with support, and reliable backups)?

LDC Via at ICON UK

We were sponsors and exhibitors at ICON UK this year, once again put together by the splendid Tim Clark and held at IBM’s excellent London client centre on the South Bank.

We spoke at a well-attended sponsor session, in part showing off our new offering LDC Via Lens, and had a number of excellent conversations with people. Thanks so much to everyone who dropped by and said hello! ICON UK raised an amazing £5,000 for The Rainbow Trust this year with attendee fees, a raffle and a gala night auction.

As always with these conferences, there were prizes to be had. Our closing session give-away was a Sonos Play:1, won by Rob Mason of Redtable Information Solutions: well done Rob!

(Photos courtesy of Chris Harris)

What's it all for?

Do any of these sound like your thoughts or conversations?

• “The business relies on this old Notes application, but we have nobody who can maintain it for us.”
• “We’re migrating to Office 365, but we have no idea what we’re going to do with our Notes data and applications.”
• “Our Domino server is at capacity, but we can’t just delete stuff because we need that data.”
• “That database is mahoosive! Surely we can archive it somehow?”
• “I can’t face opening that view, it will take hours to index.”
• “We need to integrate that Notes application with our other applications, and do it all on mobile devices while we’re at it.”
• “All our servers are moving to the cloud. So, what about the Domino server that only one division uses: why isn’t that in the cloud too?”
• “The users constantly struggle to find the data they need in that old application. I daren’t turn on full text searching on it — the server can’t cope.”
• “We need to retain that old data for compliance, but we really don’t want those servers clogging up our server racks any more.”
• “We tried migrating applications to SharePoint, but it’s far too complex and expensive so they’re still on Domino.”

If so, we need to talk.