HCL Domino Reviews

Domino is the server and HCL Notes is a product installed on that server. 

This solution can be used for workflow application so that applications can be easily developed.

The client version of this solution could be faster and be made simpler for non-IT users. You will need to have some knowledge of Notes to correctly install this solution.

I have been using this solution for 20 years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution.

The technical support for this solution is good.

Positive

We previously used an IBM product which had poor customer support while HCL does a great job at supporting their clients. 

Domino took about 15 minutes to set up for users who have technical knowledge. 

In my opinion, it is better to have one developer for the application, and one to administer the server. However, this could be done by one person. 

We have experienced a return on investment using this solution. 

For 30 licenses, we pay $1,500 every year. It is not an expensive product. 

A company who is starting to implement an IT infrastructure, will need a program for mailing and Domino is a very good mailing product and also manages the sharing the documents well. For people or companies who need a workflow application, this is one of the best in the world.

This solution is useful for external stakeholders who need to interact with the database of the company. The application can also be used on a number of different devices. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We have developed 100 plus applications on this platform. For instance, the entire HR solution is built on that solution. Our HR management system is on Notes and Domino. The leave management system in Notes and Domino as well as the employee attendance system, performance reviews, and the reimbursement management system. Any area of HR and sub-service of employees is developed on Notes and Domino. 

We have developed some sort of interface with the procurement management system that is eventually integrated with Oracle Financials. There are so many other processes of our core banking system that are developed on Notes and Domino. They all are connected to our core banking systems, our Oracle Financial, and other systems. The main focus is that any process that requires any approvals or any workflows, is developed on Notes and Domino.

It is a wonderful tool. 

It offers a very stable environment. 

The security is very good.

The integration capabilities are great. 

It is a beautiful platform for low-code and no-code developments and offers comprehensive solution development.

The pricing is excellent.

HCL is doing a wonderful job. I appreciate HCL. Whatever they are introducing in terms of new features has been great. I've got 20 years of experience on Notes and Domino and I love their way of working. They are improving the product continuously. That's the reason I'm trying my best to get approval from our regulator to keep the product intact.

Recently, IBM sold the product to HCL. Since Pakistan and India have some problems on a domestic level, we were actually considering replacing it with Indian products from the organization. We're just facing some regulatory issues.

I've been using the solution for 20 years or so at this point. It's been a while. 

The solution is stable. In 20 years, I don't think we've had even five minutes of downtime despite all the upgrades, parallel activities, patch management, et cetera. Everything was done in parallel and we have never, never, ever had even five minutes of blackout for users.

We have approximately 13,500 to 14,000 users on this solution.

We might switch to another solution. It's not clear yet if we will.

We find the price to be quite reasonable. It's not overly expensive.

We have evaluated SAP, Oracle ERP, and IBM BPM, as well as SharePoint. We were planning to migrate the entire solution on the platform known as Xpage. Xpage is a wonderful web interface for Notes and Domino on which when you design an application, it seamlessly works on the client, web, and mobile. You design once and use it anywhere. That's the concept. We've also looked into Mendix. 

SharePoint is a good tool, however, it cannot handle complex scenarios. The stability is also a challenge in SharePoint as Microsoft does not provide a clear roadmap on its product. If you develop an application on this platform, tomorrow they'll bring a new version and they don't provide the upgrade. We need to rebuild everything on the new product as we have already developed so many systems on VB6, then we were planning to switch them on .NET. And eventually, the .NET version one was introduced for a short time, and then the new language was introduced, C#.

It's really difficult to migrate the entire system from one language of one platform to another. Just like if you spend one year building an application and this application is discontinued by the product owner.

That's the reason we prefer Notes and Domino. We are using few applications that we developed 20 years ago. We upgraded Notes and Domino on four major releases, however, a 20-years-old application can still work fine. We don't need to modify this application. We don't need to upgrade this application. Backward compatibility is marvelous on Notes and Domino.

We're just customers and end-users.

We have not received the approvals to upgrade the solution on 11, which is why we are still using the last version released by IBM.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. I've been extremely happy with its capabilities.

It's for communication, collaboration, and applications.

It has been helpful for payroll solutions and controlling what we are seeing. It helps in providing good access control for the documents we are sharing with our team and with the external team.

The DAOS feature is the most valuable. It helps to save some of my storage.

Its performance and integration could be better. It has capabilities for large deployment with several servers, but in the latest interface, running with different servers isn't supported.

They need to provide better compatibility with third-party tools.

I've been using it for fifteen or sixteen years.

It's stable. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of stability.

It's scalable. I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability.

Their technical support is definitely a ten out of ten.

Positive

Our setup is on-prem. We are an HCL partner, and we provide support to our customers for their cloud and on-premises as well.

We've seen an ROI.

I'd rate it a seven out of ten in terms of price. 

Overall, I'd rate HCL Domino an eight out of ten.

We are an insurance broker and use HCL Domino for our customer relationship management. We use it to write applications for use in our company.

We use this solution for our email, workgroup, and especially for customer relationship management. We have all of our documents in this system, and it stores information about all of our processes.

We have been able to set up a portal using a special XPage application that gives our customers access to this system.

It is very easy to start writing applications.

A big advantage that is very important to us is that the ACL access to the documents belongs to the records, as opposed to the kind of record.

They update the features regularly and recently added multifactor authentication.

The XPage programming capability should be improved because it is not as modern as the other languages that we work with.

Recently, we have had a lot of trouble with the server.

The biggest problem for us is the performance. We have been working with this product for a long time and our database now contains approximately two million documents. It takes a very long time. We purchased super-fast storage with special disks and nothing helps the performance.

We have problems developing special cases.

I have been working with HCL Domino for 22 years.

This is a stable solution, provided that the database is not very big. When we have a large database then there are problems with stability. 

The database can scale to a certain size but after that, there are issues with reliability. Yesterday, for example, I worked with a database that contained 1.8 petabytes of data.

We have approximately 200 users inside the company, and we have approximately 700 customers from outside that use it.

We have two people that develop programs, two more for technical support, and I manage the team.

We use technical support only when we upgrade. We do not contact them but rather, just visit the webpage.

The initial setup is very easy. We have experience with it.

It is installed in our own data center, and it takes a few hours to set it up well, with the proper configuration.

We have three people in charge of deployment and maintenance.

We chose to pay for our licensing fees annually.

We plan on switching to another solution because of the performance. That is the only complaint that we have about the product.

This is a solution that I would recommend for a business that is just starting. I would not recommend it for big business because it gets slower over time, and we haven't seen any improvement in years. The only thing that changes is the version number, rather than the performance. To us, there's nothing new in that regard.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

We use the solution as a domain-specific framework to develop small applications to perform specific tasks.

The solution provides data encryption, valuable insights, and security for a specific group of users. Also, it enables ease of deployment, making the development process easier. We can work on the system remotely without online access as well.

They should provide the solution's integration with other AI applications. Also, its risk management feature needs improvement. In addition, its technical support could be better.

I have been using the solution for more than ten years.

I rate the solution's stability a nine. We encounter system downtime issues sometimes.

I rate the solution's scalability a five out of ten. It could be better.

The solution's customer service needs improvement.

The solution's initial setup process is complicated. It requires building applications, installing servers, and testing them. It follows importing data as per users' requirements. Also, the time needed for deployment depends on the use cases. It takes a long time for financial systems with multiple data inputs. The process needs to be faster to keep the users engaged.

The solution is less expensive compared to other vendors.

It is an excellent solution. I rate it a ten out of ten.

The best feature of HCL Domino is that you can use Notes for messaging plus application, not just for messaging. It's not a main system only, okay?

Another good feature is that the HCL Domino server is supported in all platforms, e.g. AIX, Windows, and Linux. Microsoft Exchange only works on the Windows server.

In terms of stability and security on the server side and applications, I also find HCL Domino very strong in those areas.

HCL Domino needs to be more user-friendly, as end users prefer Outlook over it, because they find Outlook easier to use.

We've been working with HCL Domino for the past year.

HCL Domino is strong, stability-wise.

I find the technical support for HCL Domino very helpful.

Deployment of HCL Domino is easy. You can deploy a Domino server in 10 minutes, e.g. no preparation, no domain preparation is needed. With Exchange and active directory, you need to extend the schema, but because HCL Domino has its own directory service, there is no need for this. It does not rely on Active Directory. You can integrate it with Active Directory, but you do not need to extend your Active Directory schema, and you do not need to add the object, unlike what you need to do with Exchange.

HCL Domino has reasonable pricing. It's not expensive. If you compare its price with Exchange, they have the same product pricing. They are within the same range in terms of pricing, but Microsoft played it another way.

Microsoft went to the customers and told them: "We can offer you ELA for a price agreement, and you can get Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Dynamics for free," so the customers made the decision of reducing their investment in HCL Domino, for them to get Exchange for free. This is the reason why customers are willing to migrate from HCL Domino to Exchange, plus there's also more customer familiarity from Exchange than HCL Domino.

We were able to evaluate Exchange.

We've been dealing with different HCL solutions: HCL Domino, HCL Notes, HCL Domino Volt, and HCL Basics. We're a partner of HCL. We're working with the latest version of HCL Domino: version 12.0.

The HCL Domino market is very small, e.g. there's not a lot of customers, or the segment using it isn't large, because Microsoft recently went to the customers and told them IBM already sold the product, and internally, IBM will use Exchange. When you migrate the HCL Domino environment to Exchange, there's a new IBM ELA deal where you can get Exchange for free. The HCL Domino segment then shrunk, so the number of customers using it is very small. The big customers have now migrated to Microsoft Exchange, and the rest will migrate eventually.

We don't have many support facilities in Egypt now, so customers transferred to a different product, e.g. Exchange for the market segment. It's really different, especially in an Office 365 model and Teams collaboration, e.g. using Teams, the competition was not fair.

My suggestion to people planning on starting their use of HCL Domino is to mix it
with other applications, rather than comparing it with Microsoft Exchange as a messaging tool, or just using it for messaging, because HCL Domino is a collaboration tool. With it, you can offer applications to different departments, build applications and share it with different departments, etc. It's more preferable to utilize HCL Domino plus messaging, than just using it for messaging only, then comparing it with Exchange.

My rating for HCL Domino is a ten out of ten.

Our customers have many servers that work with HCL Domino.

HCL Domino is the best product from a security point of view. HCL Domino can be used for office protocol management, vertical applications, and data entry.

HCL Domino could have a better interface.

We have been a business partner with HCL Domino for thirty years.

HCL Domino is a stable solution.

I rate HCL Domino a nine out of ten for scalability.

HCL Domino's pricing depends on the number of users, but its license is not cheap.

HCL Domino is a product that doesn't have a modern framework or structure from the point of system architecture. However, from a security point of view, it is a very good solution that protects your data in a way that other products cannot.

Overall, I rate HCL Domino an eight out of ten.

The security features are great. I like the ease of development. The workflow is pretty easy. These are the three main things I appreciate about the solution.

The deployment process is very easy.

It's a reliable, stable product.

We can scale it if we want to. 

We'd like to see the speed of the Domino server improve. My customers keep on complaining about the speed of connectivity, irrespective of the bandwidth we use. Sometimes it is very slow.

The solution is expensive.

The ease of using the HDP server could be better. Currently, we can run an HDP server and install Domino. However, I would like an easy interface to integrate any HDP server with Domino. 

The client is pretty heavy. It should be made a bit lighter.

I am a SME on Domino. I've been working on Domino for the last 20 or 22 years.

It has been stable so far. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

We find the solution to be very scalable. 

We have about 45 people using the product in our company.

Technical support is not ideal. The actual website is pretty complex. You never know where to go if you need something. 

Neutral

We used to use SharePoint. The licensing and file sharing was good on it. Most users had used SharePoint at some point and we didn't really have to do any training when we used it. That said, we found Domino to be better.

The solution is very simple to deploy. It's not complex at all. 

Right now, I control the infrastructure of Domino. I do the development and handle the administration. Therefore, an organization only really needs one person to maintain everything. 

We handle the deployment ourselves. It shouldn't take more than half an hour to install the server. 

The licensing of Domino is expensive. One user license is $100. Compared to SharePoint, which is free when you buy the server, Domino is a lot. 

We're end-users.

We never upgraded to HCL 11. We are still on IBM Domino 9. Although we have the license, we didn't go for the upgrade since we are comfortable with IBM Domino 9.

I'd advise potential users to keep the application simple. Don't try to make things complicated. 

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.