Ned Batchelder writes about
The downside of living online:
Right now, both Bloglines and del.icio.us are down, so I can't read aggregated blogs, or bookmark interesting stuff I find.
Over the years I've customised a lot of the systems I use in order to "run my life" (I don't like the acronym "GTD" so maybe "RML" will work for me better). I've since archived my custom invoicing system, but am still using my "PLN" (personal life navigator) which handles bookmarks and important information, as well as some important document libraries filled with Notes/Domino/ASP.NET/PHP information.
One of the ongoing concerns has always been around putting things online, and online only. In the past, this would mostly be Domino databases. Domino stuff works quite nicely to alleviate my concerns - I simply do a database which has both a Domino and a Notes frontend, and which replicates locally to wherever I might be. This means when I'm travelling, or offsite, I can access "my stuff" via a web client, and get access to whatever I need. When I'm in the office or at home, I have a choice, and when I'm without an Internet connection I'll have a local replica available too.
This sort of approach is incredibly simple and incredibly commonplace with Notes/Domino. Recently I've looked at migrating a few of my "RML" systems over to ASP/IIS/SQL, and this consideration has been the main thing which has stopped the project dead in it's tracks. There's simply no easy way to handle that sort of approach for someone as paranoid as me out of the box.
At the moment my solution is to keep using Domino. As I'm doing a mix of Domino & ASP.NET development on a day to day basis this isn't such a worry, but going forward it could be a concern. As soon as I stop having easy access to Domino servers to host these things on it's going to become a lot harder to justify their existence. At this point, I'm really not sure what I'm going to do when this happens - however until then, posts like Ned's remind me of why I'm concerned about it.