HCL Domino (formerly IBM Domino, and before that Lotus Domino) is an enterprise application development platform, boasting mobile-app capabilities to enterprise authentication and a companion low-code app builder called Domino Volt.
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Sencha
Score 6.8 out of 10
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Sencha is a mobile application development platform acquired by IDERA in 2017.
Domino is best in medium-sized businesses of 20-100 employees. It's too complicated to implement in very small companies unless you have good external resources. It scales up very well for larger companies but the pressures of users wanting particular "brand-name" software can become difficult. If you want a restricted "extranet/portal" system for a limited set of members it's a great system, particularly if you add a Domino CRM on top. Unlike Microsoft, you never have to resort to command-line tools, like PowerShell, in Domino to get things done.
It's great to develop business applications. Previously, we tried different technologies but we find it the most suitable for us. We also deploy a generic backend so we don't need to install anything new to implement new applications. This helps us to develop very fast and with very low effort.
We use SharePoint, SQL and Teams but only for the things that they excel in. For example, we use teams for small team interactions (including external participants). We use teams for meetings too. We've discovered that Teams collaboration is not as full-functional as Domino and more importantly, that our members (financial services) do not trust the Open Office365 cloud. SharePoint and Team collaborative features are often blocked in our member organizations. Domino is much easier to identify and unblock at the firewall level. It's much easier to restrict collaboration to approved options in Domino.
Each of the above platforms offer a specific solution. Sencha provides a complete solution that is a library of components as well as a framework to modularize your application so that it's better manageable. Once you get over the learning curve of the whole technology it's a breeze to implement new functionality within the application. We have an aggressive client who comes to us every other day with some new requirement, and sencha has been able to answer all of those without issues.
The immediate impact on my organization as a non-profit is cost. Enterprise pricing for a Domino solution is exponentially more inexpensive than more popular applications.
Of the most obvious impacts is user familiarity. Given a vast majority of the employment pool having familiarity with MS products, orienting new employees to Domino\Notes is burdensome. Adoption is slow and resistance is high.
Hiring Domino administrators and developers is increasingly challenging.
The recent sale of the Domino platform away from IBM is concerning.
