Migrating from Domino.Doc

January 27, 2009 by Gary Walsh

At Lotusphere 2009 IBM announced they will be discontinuing Lotus Document Manager  (aka Domino.Doc).  No surprise really, as the word has been on the street for some time now.  IBM is providing a couple of options.

  • If you do not need full featured document management, migrate to Quickr
  • If you need the advanced features and capability of a EDMS, migrate to Quickr with the connector to either FileNet or IBM Content manager

At this time the Quickr connector is only available on the J2EE version of Quickr.  The Domino version is coming, but so far there is no published delivery date. That means you need to install a Websphere infrasture if you want to take advantage of the one to one license swap.  You also have knowledge skills on the IT and user side to deal with, and the challenge of migrating between software that runs on different platforms.

So lets say you are a small or medium sized shop running DomDoc, you need the advanced document managment features of DomDoc, but you cannot afford the infrastructure costs, training and migration services that will be required to move to one of the alternatives above.

There is an alternative.  DOCOVA
  • Docova is a pure Domino application, so you can keep your Domino infrastructure
  • Data is spread across multiple libraries (NSFs) for scalability
  • The Docova Web based User Interface feels like a Windows app even though it runs in a browser to reduce end user training requirements
  • Docova's functionality is full featured with customizable workflow, advanced version control...many of the features in Domino.Doc that are not in Quickr
  • You will be migrating from a Domino application to a Domino application. That means the migration of data is going to be quicker and cleaner.
  • You may be able to recycle some of your Domino.Doc customization
  • Customization of Docova is via Domino Designer, not an API
  • Docova supports VISTA, Office 2003 and 2007, and Domino R 8
  • We have done this migration before and have some migration tools available
  • The Docova code base is open, and you can get at script libraries to automatically create folders and documents, so you can customize it without having to work through and API

Docova is NOT a silver bullet.  It does not run in the Notes client. It will not automatically spawn new NSF files when thresholds are reached (although we may add this feature in the future).  The migration tool we have is basic, and is only a starting point.  This is, however, a viable alternative...something that deserves investigation.

We are not trying to compete against IBM. In this case, we see a hole in their portfollio, one that we fill nicely with an alternative that will keep Lotus customers with Lotus rather than have them explore products from other vendors.

Check it out at http://www.docova.com

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Tags:  Lotusphere2009  Product Updates  Thought Leadership