Qld transport department prepares to dump Lotus Notes

Queensland’s Department of Transport and Main Roads is preparing to ditch its IBM Notes databases.

The department is in the early stages of sounding out potential partners to aid its migration away from IBM Notes (the ‘Lotus Notes’ branding was ditched in 2012).

Transport has a range of applications based on the most recent version of Notes: IBM Notes 9 Social Edition.

Currently the department’s Notes-based databases contain some over 5000 active documents, each of which it says possesses a deep archive history and lifecycle data relating to document history change management.

The department currently believes the migration will need to encompass around 200 separate Notes databases (Notes Storage Facilities), totalling around 500GB of data.

“The repository embodies core policy, standard, process, and procedural detail necessary to support operational service delivery state-wide for its customer service and personal transport business areas,” according to the department.

The migration process is scheduled to be completed by mid-2019.

“The project is predominantly concerned with the safe and reliable migration of enterprise data to replacement target solutions and / or legacy data archive solutions,” states a request for information released by the department.

“These migration activities are considerable and dominate the balance of effort needed to enable Notes platform decommissioning.”

The migration will see some databases archived, but a significant number are still in active use and will need to be shifted to a new platform; the department expects to migrate and consolidate 50+ actively used databases to around 40 business applications.