The Upcoming Challenge!
The 64-bit Notes Client and Nomad Web/Android/iOS bring many new opportunities as well as a host of challenges with them. Your Domino Applications might be at risk of not working on these new platforms!
The new clients will likely require code changes if you want your existing applications to continue working on them. This makes understanding the limitations of these new platforms an essential first step.
panagenda’s own Julian Robichaux held a great webinar on How to Prepare Applications for Notes 64-bit Clients. A word of caution: it’s quite the extensive technical deep-dive. Julian looks at a plenitude of code patterns you will need to adapt to get ready for the 64-bit client. Dozens of links are provided in the accompanying PDF document to dig even deeper.
We see a similar story developing for the new platforms for Nomad on Web, Android and iOS. They offer tremendous value, a next level user experience and portability, but they also come with a number of LotusScript Restrictions and Compatibility Limitations to consider.
If you want to be ready to utilize what these amazing new platforms have to offer, you will need to prepare.
How to Prepare?
The “simple” answer is to find out which applications you use in what manner to limit your initial scope. Then check the entire source code in each of these applications for incompatible code patterns and re-develop the affected code blocks.
Alternatively, you could go through every application in use in each of these new clients to find out what doesn’t work anymore. Then re-develop where issues or even crashes occur. Easier said than done though. Some might be “silent failures” where a code block stops working, but no error is pops up.
All of this promises a tremendous amount of manual labor. Both for understanding usage and analyzing source code. Much of it will need to be done by highly skilled Notes developers, of which there are fewer and fewer out there.
Focusing on the most relevant applications and prioritizing accordingly can make it easier. However, identifying what is actually being used in an environment is not an easy task. And certainly not one you can do quickly, unless you have help.
Our solutions are built to save you time and effort.
The first objective will likely be understanding the scope of affected applications and which code blocks need remediation.
We built iDNA Application’s latest release specifically to speed up this process. Over two dozen new Code Insights have been added to help with identifying these crucial code blocks which will potentially lead to issues and have to be checked.
In addition, there are a number of ways to analyze and summarize findings in order to prepare tasks and Todo-lists. This will enable you to streamline your remediation process and greatly reduce time and effort spent in this crucial planning stage.
Once this initial analysis is complete, it is very likely that prioritization will need to happen. The goal will be reducing the risk of impacting business processes. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, avoid spending time and effort on applications that you could ignore or archive. Here are a few questions we expect you will need to answer to further refine the project scope.
- Which applications are top priority to evaluate and prepare?
- Which applications might not need to be re-developed at all?
- Do you need to make all applications ready for all new platforms?
- Who are stakeholders for individual applications to help with decision making?
- Which departments or locations are cost centers associated with applications?
Narrow the scope by understanding usage
The key to these questions is understanding Domino application usage. Not simply whether you use an application not, but who uses it, how and for what purpose. Learning about stakeholders for an application enables you to find application owners. They can help you to make better decisions regarding the best path forward for an application. It also allows you to identify cost centers and understand in which business processes these applications may play an important role.
All of this becomes significantly easier by utilizing one of iDNA’s core strengths: understanding application usage from a wide spectrum of angles. Be it by user, by department, by location or on a historical axis by read and write activity. iDNA provides all this information out of the box.
Finally, when it comes to the actual work of re-developing, iDNA can help to streamline and minimize that effort as well. Code-duplication of more than 90% is a very common occurrence in Notes environments. This means there is a very good chance you will only need to re-develop a fraction of the total number of matching code blocks with potential issues.
Of course, you will need to apply the fixes to all affected applications. However, there is a big difference between analyzing and fixing a piece of code and copy/pasting finished work. Not only is the time and effort substantially different for those jobs, but the skill profile required for the person that does the job is quite different as well. A potential scenario in large environments would be that senior developers are responsible for fixing code blocks, while it’s the junior developers’ job to distribute and verify fixes.
To Sum It Up!
If you want to use the new platforms of Notes 64-bit and Nomad Web/Android/iOS, it is very likely that you will have to re-develop parts in many of your applications.
The most important thing we tried to do in this article is to show you what the pitfalls are, where you can find documentation to identify what you need to change, and how you could approach the challenge.
panagenda’s builds its solutions to support our customers in situations just like the one you are facing right now. No matter if you are dealing with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of applications. iDNA Applications will dramatically reduce time and effort invested in getting ready for the new platforms.
If we managed to pique your interest, you may experience iDNA Applications in our sandbox or contact us for further information and a trial license.
