5 Signs Your HCL Notes Client is Probably Outdated

Our customers frequently ask our support team: When should we update our Notes client versions running in our company-wide environment?

This is a fair question. On the one hand you have a running system that everyone in your organization is familiar with. On the other hand, continually evolving technologies offer new opportunities, such as increasing operational efficiency, ensuring compatibility and security, and meeting customer and employee expectations.

A difficult decision.

There are five key signs that can tell you that your current Notes client version is no longer ideal, and it is time for a change.

A fairly clear sign is Notes client start-up times. Does the average startup of your Notes client take more than 30 seconds? Then it is probably time to think about an upgrade. Newer versions – even with many linked apps and plugins – usually do not take longer than 10-15 seconds.

At first glance, the additional 15 seconds do not look dramatic. In addition to likely employee dissatisfaction, the extra wait time costs money and productivity. And it happens every day. Imagine your organization has 1.000 employees, then this would add up to 4 hours of unproductive working time per day or 20 hours per week or 400 hours per month. Which corresponds to more than 2 FTEs (full time equivalent) each month.

This means while your computer is struggling, your competitor is working on a streamlined more effective system. Time is money!

The Notes UI looks a bit outdated or you cannot run Notes on a Mac or an Android or iOS mobile device? This is an indicator that your Notes client versions are not compatible with your hardware requirements.

Even if you delay upgrading your Notes clients, technology will not wait for you to catch up. If your Notes clients are not up-to-date, then they become incompatible with other software that has been maintained. To upgrade is to stay relevant to business around you, for your company, and most importantly your customers.

The last security update was deployed months ago. The longer you wait, the bigger the chance you are giving someone or something to mess with your Notes client infrastructure and cost your company money. Cyber threats are more sophisticated than ever before. And they happen.

The latest EY (Ernest & Young) Global Information Security Survey revealed that 48% of all corporate boards believe a cyberattack or data breach will harm their businesses to some extent over the next 12 months.

Upgrades for Notes clients protects your organization’s data against external threats which are looking for security vulnerabilities. Please don’t forget your Domino servers!

When more than half of your organization’s Notes clients are running elder versions like 7, 8.5 or 9.0.x, the likelihood of a malicious breach of potentially sensitive data points, such as business data or employee data, increases dramatically. With hackers looking for new ways to target vulnerable data in our evolving digital environment, taking care about outdated software may be more important than you think.

You spend more and more time keeping the system running. Each Notes client version and corresponding system requires maintenance investment. The question is how much of this is spent on operating and maintaining existing critical software components and legacy code, including costly older systems. Over time this will increase annual costs.

There are several contributing factors to this. On the one hand, older code tends to be bulky, lengthy, and more complex – understanding the code used in old systems requires a lot of effort for ongoing support.

On the other hand, old technologies are often incompatible with newer ones, leading to integration, development and maintenance issues and potentially creating security vulnerabilities.

As technology evolves, compliance is becoming a major issue for the protection of employee and customer-facing applications. Achieving compliance with legacy systems is time-consuming and expensive. It will not happen as quickly compared to new HCL Notes/Domino versions that are often compliant by default. It also requires a lot of testing to ensure a legacy infrastructure is compliant with the given regulations.

You have a hard time finding specialists who want to take care of elder Notes client versions. Finding software engineers, who not only have the expertise, but will work with outdated systems, can be an enormous challenge to say the least. Many engineers do not have recent experience and sometimes no developer hours with older versions.

Beyond that – given the abundance of other options, many simply choose not to. They know that working with old technologies may affect their future competitiveness in the job market.

Software upgrades. No one wants to stop what they are doing while they wait for their system to upgrade. It seems like a waste of time. But the reality is the opposite. A delay in upgrading your Notes clients could expose your organization to major security risks, lose business speed, incur high additional costs, and reduce employee satisfaction.

Fundamentally, we recommend modernizing your workplace.

Get modern and up to date by upgrading your Notes clients to the latest stable version.

MarvelClient Upgrade supports you every step of the way to ensure reliable upgrades are done in no time.

Watch the webinar recording to see how upgrades can quickly be deployed with ease. No matter how complex your Notes client configurations may be.