A lot has changed since I last wrote a blog post. One of the biggest changes career-wise has been a decision by the company I work for to move away from IBM Domino and switch to a different platform for all future and new development. We had already started the process of switching all our users to Office365 for email so keeping Domino around just didn’t make a lot of sense.
Thankfully I was given the reigns in deciding what direction we should move to in a post Domino world and given our skills in using Java because of XPages the decision was easy, or was it?
You really don’t know what you have got till it is gone, as the song lyrics go, because Domino provides so many capabilities out of the box, you have directory and security, you have application deployment via templates, automatic code building in the designer, a backend data store, a server to run it all on, containerized applications, pretty much everything you needed to build applications is available in Domino and replacing it is not an easy task.
I’ve decided to try and start blogging against so that I can share some of the journey and hopefully make it easier for anybody else facing the same road.
Dec's Dom Blog 
Good luck. I’ve also left the Notes/Domino world behind, but pretty much use OSS.
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Alas, this is very true, and why I was particularly perturbed by the announcements Q2 2016 on abandoning 9.0.2 and “application modernization” with no clarification of what was in-scope or out-of-scope for that two-word bombshell. I appreciated immediately all that Domino provides, albeit not perfectly and not always (if ever) up-to-date. Replacing all is a massive effort. Replacing part is fraught with challenges not only from a technical standpoint but a financial standpoint. The Bluemix argument for providing cloud access was far from compelling, because you pay for a runtime when your Domino server for data (which you still needed) gave you that for free. The HTTP server may not be great, but there’s no additional cost. Whatever you want to replace for something better, it’s still a cost over and above what’s there, so trying to persuade customers down the road of benefits is a challenge until you’ve had enough experience to make a proper pro/con comparison, which requires the customers to get the real-world experience. It’s a chicken and egg challenge that usually ends up with some deggree of compromise. I’ll be interested to learn from your experiences. I’ll be interested to hear IBM’s vision next month.
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