Safeguarding the integrity of your data against unauthorized alteration or destruction is a business challenge that must be addressed now. Vendors who rely on their data to survive, such as investment firms, can be brought to their knees by compromised data. Robust, accountable controls surrounding any form of output data from production are essential.

From ad hoc to mission-critical
Lotus Notes was introduced in 1989 as groupware, software to help groups collaborate more effectively on business issues. It handled simple functions such as email, calendaring, scheduling, and document repositories. More and more features were added until Notes allowed knowledgeable end-users to perform rapid application development.

By 1996, the Notes platform had become an established way of building applications. However, there was a corollary to this activity -- production environments exploded so that now, in 2006, we have serious data integrity issues within these environments. Process controls aided by technology are needed to ensure the credibility of these Notes environments.

Notes-specific challenges
Within the Lotus Notes and Domino environment, there are a set of common problems that can result in potentially dangerous effects, as shown in Table A:

Another Notes specific challenge to data integrity is the replication feature, which speeds application deployment to diverse environments. It can also erode data integrity when remote users attempt to merge documents post-replication. The save/replication conflicts process is usually done manually. It can be a time-consuming process, especially with large database installations, and is often ignored. But when ignored, even the most reliable data can get lost or become populated with errors. Save/replication conflicts are typically resolved by blindly deleting the conflict document. There is a better way!

Prevention and detection
Considering the investment organizations have made in their Lotus Notes and Domino infrastructure, it's critical to promote data integrity and to help maximize the return on investment. In general, you can address threats to data integrity by implementing both preventive and detective initiatives such as:

• Regular data backups (preventive)
• Controlling access to data via security mechanisms (preventive)
• Designing user interfaces that prevent the input of invalid data (preventive)
• Using error detection and correction software (detective)