Assume you have a database from an employee in ODS 43 format. The employee quit the company and you put his mail file on a DVD.
Whoooosh … 10 years later you are asked to find a special document in this database. At this time you’re running Notes 12.5 with ODS 99. I know, Lotus Notes will always be downward compatible …
What I want to say is, that all archive systems offer an option to have a copy of all or of all selected documents on a cd or DVD and you can hand out this storage to anyone, regardless if he or she has the associated appication installed on his computer.
The data is written on the storage together with a runtime version of the application the data is created with.
Will we ever have this feature in Notes ? Anyone at IBM reading this and like to leave a comment ?
Didn’t you just create one with the USB solution? 🙄
If you want the data to stay secure, you would also need some of Notes’ security features. I guess you *could* use Wanda (or your own USB solution, of course) for this purpose: create a Notes client on an USB stick, put the archive db on it, and you’re set.
A couple of issues, though. Who nows if a 32 bits Windows app will run on your PC OS in ten years? I guess it will, but you can’t be 100% sure. And you need an ID that’s certified until eternity, plus to remember your password for at least 10 years 🙂
For securing the data you should keep the medium in a safe, that should be no problem with archived data.
To access the Notes files you just need the notes.jar and a simple java thin client to read the mails (why not take NotesBuddy, it’s just 5MB )