Today, I needed to access some information stored a long time ago. A quick search of my system found it -- in a Notes database that I created in 1993. I was able to open the database and access the information easily, even though the database and data were created almost 16 years ago. How many products and data files can your current systems read from that long ago?
I started thinking about how many personal computers I have owned in that time and it has to be close to 20, covering the following operating systems:
OS/2
Windows 3.1
Windows For Workgroups 3.11
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows NT
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
I have used this same Notes database, with few changes on each of these systems. Oh, and there was no data conversion or migration. (Unless you call replicating a Notes database to a new machine a migration.) For people in the yellow bubble this is nothing new. For people working with other products and platforms this may be a novel concept.
What brought all of this up is the fact that I'm writing a paper on enterprise content management and I have been reading about the nightmares of managing and migrating content. For the most part, this has simply not been an issue. That's productive!
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Discussion/Comments (2):
Funny, I see the same thing, when a client called me back 12 years later, sure enough in my directory of lotus databases was information on their network and work we did, mostly out of date, but helpful for some insights.
And of course emails from R3.
It just works, and did mostly, from the start.
Chris Hudson (http://www.abs.gov.au): 8/1/2009 8:56:21 PM
We have a number of databases that were created in 1993 that are still actively used. Even the design has not changed that much as many of the design elements are still signed with flat certificates from that era and still quite happily function in our now hierarchical environment.