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The Domino application portfolio of an enterprise can grow into a huge number of applications over time, deployed to leverage the existing Domino infrastructure or use of rapid application development (RAD) environment to build new capabilities to support the growing business. The document repositories and discussion databases can increase rapidly if applications are created across regions without proper planning and governance. Applications added to the Domino application portfolio without central monitoring can possibly lead to inefficiency in managing the Domino infrastructure due to redundancy, dormancy, under-utilization, and expiration. The process of application retirement or application sunset is a good practice to keep Domino infrastructure lean and efficient. The additional benefit is the recovery of disk space and extra processing power for Domino server to cater the reduced number of application databases.
The application retirement is an essential step in the Domino Application lifecycle. The application retirement process helps identify the applications that are under-utilized or dormant. The unused applications then can be deleted or archived. The application retirement process can also result in an adaption of new review practices as well as help achieve modernizing the existing under-utilized applications. The usage of legacy applications drops over the period of time because of their out-of-date technologies and not very intuitive features. Replacing these old-approach applications with the new XPages enabled Web2.0 capabilities and rich features that are much faster to build and use helps in reviving the application usage. The application retirement helps organization maintain a healthy, lean, and efficient application portfolio.
For the application retirement process, have a central application repository that maintains the records of existing applications, categorized under respective portfolio, for example Quality, Sales, Marketing, Innovation, Business Intelligence, Customer Relation Management, Business Support Services, Document Management, Legal, and Discussion database. Consider forming a Domino application portfolio management committee or team to ally processes and manage central application portfolio repository. Any request for new database should go through the Domino application portfolio management process. Implement an application portfolio intelligence process built with capabilities of automated report, agents, or robots. The application portfolio management process does the following:
- Prepares inventory of all applications hosted on all servers across various locations.
- Track user activities or traffic for each application in the inventory. you could re-use the information in database catalog on each server and database usage statistics.
- Generate reports about dormant, under-utilized, expired, ready for renewal, retired application and decommissioned databases.
This process helps your team to rationalize applications, their retirement, decommission, and archive to avoid redundancy and increase common share (that is to reuse existing database for similar purpose, generally the document repositories and team discussion databases). This process also helps to bring better governance, visibility, and control on the databases across Domino application portfolios at different locations. The following figure shows the state of ungoverned, governed, and retired applications, resulting from a rationalization process.
Parent topic:
2.0 Application development lifecycle