Do you have an old Domino app that just doesn’t look good or is clunky and old? Or one that you’re embarrassed to show new employees because it looks like it was built in the mid-1990s (and maybe it was)? With the newest version of Domino, it’s easy to modernize — and means you don’t have to contemplate migrating away from the platform, which can take years, have ballooning costs, and often doesn’t add new, better functionality or business value.

We are hearing from customers that they are able to easily modernize old apps and bring their original investments into the future. The HCL Lab Services team recently modernized an old, internal issue-tracking app to show you what a modernized Domino app experience could be. It’s easy to give an app not only a better look and feel — a face lift — but also to make it easily work on mobile devices.

This app has most of the features you’d typically find in an enterprise Domino app — workflow, access control, and security functionality. Accessed by thousands of employees every day to track business-critical businesses and approval systems, the app was designed to assist HCL in tracking issues found in various build systems, as well as assign and route those issues to key subject-matter experts.  But it wasn’t exactly pretty.

Even though this was built in 2006 (14 years ago!) on Domino v7, it was a rock-solid app. Even though it was totally stable and reliable, it was ugly and awkward and, because it was used by so many people, it desperately needed to be modernized to today’s app standards.

The Development process was as follows:

1. 1. We started designing what we wanted the app to look like and created a UI prototype using Adobe XD.
   2. To build the new app, we used Domino v10 and installed the following tools:
      • Node.js
      • Bootstrap 3.x
      • Domino App Dev Pack 1.0.2
      • WebStorm
      • jQuery 3.4.x
      • jQuery Datatables plug-in
   3. We used WebStorm for our web development and created standard CRUD (create, read, update, delete) components for the new web UI.
   4. We integrated security functionality with the new Node app and integrated with Azure AD so users are able to login with their Office 365 login without managing multiple logins.
   5. Once everything was built, we performed acceptance testing to ensure that everything works and is ready to be live.

We had a  web designer and developer on this project. Step 1 was accomplished by our designer in 3 days and it took our developer 3 weeks to build the app. See these stunning after shots:

We brought this app mobile and it works on an iPad!

In less than a month, we were able to transform a complex, business-critical app by modernizing it in just a few days. We want to help you accelerate your app-modernization with Domino and preserve your historical app investment. You can unlock the great value from the Domino platform simply by modernizing. Contact us today!