7 Tips on How to Keep a Healthy, Stable and Up-to-Date Notes Domino Environment

The time has come to consider upgrading both your Notes clients and Domino servers again. This blog covers 7 useful tips on how to maintain a consistent, standardized, and healthy Notes Domino environment.

Even though 71% of all cyberattacks are of financial nature, security vulnerabilities are about much more than just buffer overflows, turning into severe financial harm when exploited. Software, in general, should be well maintained for security reasons, to improve end user satisfaction and to get the most out of your maintenance contract. A study from ServiceNow states that 60% of security exploits could have been prevented by deploying existing patches.

HCL has continued to amaze Notes customers around the world with the speed at which they deliver new Notes and Domino releases. Admittedly, not many people were very happy with Notes 9.0.1 releases beyond FP7 and then release 10 wasn’t a big hit either. With Notes 11 FP2, however, HCL won us over again. The State of Cybersecurity Report 2020 from Accenture states on p. 38, that leaders in security focus more on sustaining existing investments, which ultimately leads to faster piloting in new capabilities.

Remember that it is a bad idea to keep your clients in the Lotus or IBM folders. Doing so will increase your costs because of reduced stability and an increased number of support tickets in your organization. Furthermore, support tickets will be harder to examine and solve, and increase your costs even more.

By performing your upgrade to V11, you will also be much better prepared for V12 with all your processes documented and proven. Notes 11 FP2 IF1 is the way to go today and then continue rolling with the same processes to upgrade to V12 when ready. Upgrades lose their sting when performed regularly.

No matter what your experiences were for support hotlines before, HCL Support is not only helpful and fast, but also responsive on social media (we do suggest using the HCL support portal, though ;-)). It is always worth it to reach out when you are stuck.

If your last upgrade was over a year ago, then there is a high probability that valuable knowledge of best practices for a smooth upgrade process are long forgotten. Furthermore, small updates and changes are always easier than huge monster projects that consume a lot of resources at once.

A single point of truth about the state of your client installations makes sure that nothing is forgotten, and nobody is left behind. It is also essential to start automation processes that can be triggered once a new update is ready.

Last but not least, if you would like to save yourself weeks of effort during your next upgrade project, check out our special MarvelClient Upgrade offer. And if your last upgrade was a breeze without MarvelClient, and you expect your next upgrade to be just as easy, then you are most likely on Notes 11 FP2 already! 😊

One last shout out to HCL for their great work, as well as a strong encouragement to any organization that uses Notes and Domino to upgrade!