A Dignified Retirement for Your Lotus Notes and IBM Domino Environment
Domino Retirement Home keeps your retired Domino systems safe, searchable and defensible for as long as the law says you must keep them.
Every system gets old. The records inside it do not.
Old age homes exist because some members of the family deserve care, comfort and dignity after a lifetime of service, and because the family cannot always provide it alone. Your Lotus Notes or IBM Domino environment is in the same position. It has served your business for decades, holding contracts, approvals, client or patient records and years of email. The administrators who understood it have retired or moved on, the hardware is aging, and your legal team still has to be able to produce what is inside it.
Leaving it running is risky and expensive. Exporting it to CSV or PDF loses the application, the access rules and the evidentiary value of the original. Domino Retirement Home is the third path: we retire the environment with care and keep it intact and functioning for the length of your retention period.
We are now taking early conversations. If you are weighing how to retire a Domino environment, we would like to hear from you.
How a retirement works
- Move-in. We assess your servers and databases, shut them down in a controlled way, pack the environment and create verified images, on site or remotely.
- Care. A sealed original is stored with a hash-verified checksum, and a separate working copy is kept patched and tested, so the environment still opens years later.
- Visiting hours. Authorized people reach the records through a controlled VPN session with a Notes client. The environment can stay offline until requested, open in scheduled windows, or stay online.
- Records and reports. Each year you receive a custody attestation letter, a test-access report, a hash manifest and an access log, documents your legal or compliance team can file.
- A peaceful ending. At the end of the retention period we return the environment or destroy it, and you receive a certificate of destruction.
Built for legal and compliance teams
Compliance and legal leaders usually inherit this problem when IT has no budget and no one left who knows the platform. We speak your language: retention schedules, legal holds, audits and defensibility.
- A documented chain of custody from the day we take the environment
- An original that is never altered, with a hash manifest to prove it
- An access log of every session and administrative action
- Named backup specialists in the US and Europe, so your records never depend on one person
- A defined end of term, with return or certified destruction
US and EU requirements, medical, financial and more
We design each retirement around the rules that apply to you, including US and EU requirements and the laws that govern medical, financial and other regulated records. Your counsel decides what must be kept and for how long. We make sure it can be kept, produced and shown to be unchanged.
Healthcare
Patient and clinical records, with HIPAA and state medical record retention rules in mind.
Financial services and insurance
SEC, FINRA, SOX and state insurance retention and audit expectations.
EU and UK
GDPR and UK GDPR, including storage limits, access rights and where data is stored.
Other regulated and contractual duties
Legal holds, litigation readiness, and government, industry and contract requirements.
B2B Whisperer is not a law firm, and this page is not legal advice.
Choose how often you need to visit
Basic
Offline and sealed. We bring the environment up when you ask, for a defined access window.
Standard
Scheduled access windows during the year, for periodic reviews and audits.
Enterprise
Online behind VPN for teams that need frequent retrieval, with optional named user accounts for audit trails.
Fees depend on the size of your environment and your access needs. We quote after a short scoping call.
Domino retirement questions
How long can you keep an environment?
Most retention needs run three to seven years. We set the term with you, and longer terms are possible.
Do you keep the application, or only export the data?
We keep the working Domino environment: databases, views, forms and access rules, not flat exports. That keeps the records usable and defensible.
Is the original ever changed?
No. The sealed original is stored with a hash-verified checksum and is never modified. Any updates happen on the separate working copy.
What happens if B2B Whisperer cannot continue?
We name backup specialists in the US and Europe and define the handover of your sealed copy in the contract, so your records never depend on one person or one company.
Can we reach the records during a legal hold or audit?
Yes. Access is arranged through a controlled VPN session, and every session is logged.
Related: HCL Domino services | Domino support in the United States | Fractional CIO services
Considering a Domino retirement?
Book a short call to talk through your retention period, your regulators and your options. We are now taking early conversations.
Or email info@b2bwhisperer.com. Photo by Jonathan Gong on Unsplash.