From HCL Domino to web archive at Sika
Instead of migrating data from HCL Domino to SharePoint, Sika chose to move data to Seascape Flex web archives.
Customer
Sika is a multinational specialty chemicals company with a leading position in the development and production of systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing, and protecting in the construction and automotive industries.
Sika has subsidiaries in 101 countries around the world and over 300 manufacturing sites. With 27,000 employees, the company generated annual sales of CHF 9.3 billion in 2021.
Challenge
Sika decided to completely shut down the HCL Domino and HCL Notes environment (formerly IBM Domino and IBM Lotus Notes) by the end of 2024. However, there were still several hundred applications running on Domino in 2022, and around 200 of those were still required on a read-only (archive) basis.
The 200 archives need to remain accessible even after the 2024 cutoff date, so Sika had to find a tool that would extract the data from the archive into other formats more suitable for the long-term.
The tool would need to ensure data integrity, and support the extraction of Notes-specific design elements such as rich text, embedded views, document links, and file attachments.
Solution
Sika evaluated several products that migrated data to Microsoft SharePoint, including SWING Seascape for Notes. During the evaluation, Sika’s team was impressed by the user-friendly interface, ease of use, and great customer support.
As the evaluation progressed, Sika discovered that in addition to Microsoft SharePoint integration, SWING Seascape could generate standalone web archives from the Notes databases.
One of the main advantages of the web archive was its ability to retain as many document views as required — a user-friendly feature that promoted faster adoption. The web archive interface mimics the typical Notes look and feel, with a navigation panel on the left and documents on the right.
Furthermore, Sika discovered that the web archives could be optionally coupled with the Seascape Flex server to extend the range of capabilities.
Specifically, Sika would use Seascape Flex to:
- Connect the company’s Active Directory for user authentication and controlling database access
- Enable full-text search capability, both in the database archives and across multiple databases — a huge bonus that enhances the end-user experience
- Allow users to access the archives seamlessly using the single sign-on feature (SSO)
With the proof-of-concept complete, the ideal solution for Sika’s requirements was the Seascape for Notes data extraction to web archives, coupled with the Seascape Flex server. Sika exported data to web archives instead of moving it to Microsoft SharePoint as originally planned.
Christopher Coals, the Aveedo/Power Platform Application Developer at Sika, said: “We enjoyed excellent communication with the sales team. They bent over backwards, allowing us to test as much as we needed. They answered any questions we had and offered us a fair contract for our needs. Technical/customer support was also fantastic, with very quick turnaround, patience, and knowledge-sharing. I highly recommend SWING Software-a great company and product!”
Results
The archiving process at Sika is partially complete, including some databases as large as 50GB with over 50,000 documents.
Sika’s team migrated these databases with Seascape for Notes within 6 weeks, and the whole project is likely to be completed well ahead of deadline.
Sika will retain the original Notes databases throughout the testing phase and until each business application owner is satisfied. However, the results have been excellent so far, and both the business owners and the archive users are very happy.
Originally published at https://www.swingsoftware.com.
