As I have been tweeting recently I have finished coding the new OnTime Group Calendar Notes UI and we are now shipping it (OnTime Group Calendar 2011 ). This release is a brand new, completely rewritten, product and it’s shipping with some very cool features and UI’s. Currently we’re shipping a standalone UI (Discovery 2011) and the Notes UI (Notes 2011) with a mobile and web UI coming soon (Web 2011 and Mobile 2011). My main contribution is the OnTime Group Calendar Notes 2011 client which is a full Java based group calendar UI that runs inside the Notes 8.5 Standard client. More in a separate post about the Notes 2011 client.
Part of the OnTime Group Calendar is the backend that runs on the server. Previously we easily scaled to 100.000+ users but you normally had to run multiple group calendar databases to control access and visibility of calendar data within your organization.
This “restriction” has now been is now lifted with the new release of OnTime Group Calendar 2011. Now all customers will run a single group calendar database and the OnTime backend takes care of controlling access and visibility either based on custom configuration or based on mail database ACL’s.
To get ready for the new release we have done a number of pilot installs and there we found some very interesting performance numbers at a customer which I’ll share below.
| Text | OnTime 9.x | OnTime 2011 | % of previous |
| Users | 8.900 | 8.900 | |
| Storage need | 17 GB | 170 MB | 1% |
| Number of views required | 300 | 20 | 6.6% |
| Document count | 300.000 | 27.000 | 9% |
At another customer we went from a group calendar database of 1.3 GB to 22 MB. That’s also a reduction to a little less than 2% of the previous disk usage (1.6%).
As you can see from the above the disk savings are massive. Smaller databases leads to less I/O which leads to major improvements in performance. Domino as a backend screams for this kind of solution. So cool.
Oh and best of all – it’s still a pure Domino solution.
Impressive numbers… Let me guess: You removed all field inheritance , because you are no longer using legacy Notes views but your own Java UI?
It’s a bit more complicated than that but in essence yes – we did change the underlying document structure as we’re not using traditional Notes views anymore. For instance – previously if you had an appointment/meeting that spans 4 days we would split the document into 4 documents in order to display it correctly in Notes views. Now with an API layer and using Java we’re beyond that limitation.