The 500,000 Line Ghost: Recovering Lotus Notes Business Rules in Telecom

Telecom VPs are currently sitting on a ticking time bomb: the Lotus Notes application suite. These systems, often 15 to 25 years old, manage everything from sub-sea cable maintenance schedules to complex B2B billing logic. The problem isn't just the aging infrastructure; it’s the lotus notes business rule logic buried deep within 500,000 lines of unoptimized LotusScript and @Formula language. When the original developers have long since retired, and the documentation is non-existent, "rewriting from scratch" is a recipe for a multi-million dollar disaster.

According to Replay’s analysis, 70% of legacy rewrites fail or significantly exceed their timelines because organizations underestimate the complexity of these hidden rules. In the telecom sector, where a single billing error can trigger massive regulatory fines, the stakes of losing a single lotus notes business rule during a migration are unacceptably high.

TL;DR: Manual extraction of business logic from Lotus Notes takes approximately 40 hours per screen and has a high failure rate. Replay uses Visual Reverse Engineering to convert recorded user workflows into documented React code and Design Systems, reducing modernization timelines from 18 months to a matter of weeks with 70% average time savings.

The Technical Debt of the "Black Box"#

The global technical debt crisis has reached a staggering $3.6 trillion. For a Telecom VP, this debt is manifested in "The Black Box"—a Lotus Notes environment that "just works" but no one knows how.

Industry experts recommend against traditional "rip and replace" strategies. Why? Because 67% of legacy systems lack any form of updated documentation. When you attempt to migrate a legacy CRM or provisioning tool, you aren't just moving data; you are trying to decipher decades of "if-then" statements that handle edge cases like regional tax variances or specific hardware configurations.

Video-to-code is the process of capturing these edge cases by recording the actual UI interactions of power users. Instead of reading through 500k lines of spaghetti code, Replay watches the application in action and reconstructs the underlying logic and component architecture automatically.

Why Every Lotus Notes Business Rule is a Hidden Risk#

In a standard Lotus Notes NSF (Notes Storage Facility) database, logic is fragmented across multiple layers:

1. •Field Validations: Input translations and validations.
2. •Form Events: QuerySave, PostOpen, and QueryClose scripts.
3. •Agents: Scheduled tasks that process data in the background.
4. •Hide-When Formulas: Logic that controls UI visibility based on user roles or document status.

When you lose a lotus notes business rule during a manual migration, you don't just lose a feature; you lose the institutional knowledge of how your business handles exceptions. For example, a telecom provider might have a rule that prevents service disconnection if a customer has an active "Life Safety" flag—a rule often buried in a

event in a 20-year-old Notes form.

Comparison: Manual Extraction vs. Replay Visual Reverse Engineering#

Mapping LotusScript to Modern React Architectures#

The primary challenge in recovering a lotus notes business rule is the translation from a document-centric model to a component-based architecture. Lotus Notes treats every form as a document; modern web apps treat them as a series of stateful components.

When using Replay, the platform identifies these patterns. For instance, a "Hide-When" formula in Notes is translated into conditional rendering in React. A

validation is converted into a robust Zod schema or a custom React Hook.

Example: Translating a Validation Rule#

In LotusScript, a validation rule for a circuit ID might look like this:

lotusscript
Sub Querysave(Source As Notesuidocument, Continue As Variant)
    Dim session As New NotesSession
    Dim doc As NotesDocument
    Set doc = Source.Document
    
    If doc.GetItemValue("CircuitID")(0) = "" Then
        Msgbox "Circuit ID is required for provisioning."
        Continue = False
        Exit Sub
    End If
    
    ' Complex regex for Telecom Circuit IDs
    If Not (doc.GetItemValue("CircuitID")(0) Like "##-????-######") Then
        Msgbox "Invalid Circuit ID format."
        Continue = False
    End If
End Sub

Replay identifies this interaction during a recorded workflow and generates a modern, type-safe React equivalent within your new Design System.

The Modernized React Component#

typescript
import React from 'react';
import { useForm } from 'react-hook-form';
import { z } from 'zod';
import { zodResolver } from '@hookform/resolvers/zod';

// Replay generated this schema by observing the 'QuerySave' behavior
const CircuitSchema = z.object({
  circuitId: z.string()
    .min(1, "Circuit ID is required for provisioning.")
    .regex(/^\d{2}-[a-zA-Z]{4}-\d{6}$/, "Invalid Circuit ID format."),
});

type CircuitFormData = z.infer<typeof CircuitSchema>;

export const ProvisioningForm: React.FC = () => {
  const { register, handleSubmit, formState: { errors } } = useForm<CircuitFormData>({
    resolver: zodResolver(CircuitSchema),
  });

  const onSubmit = (data: CircuitFormData) => {
    console.log("Provisioning Circuit:", data.circuitId);
  };

  return (
    <form onSubmit={handleSubmit(onSubmit)} className="p-6 space-y-4">
      <div>
        <label className="block text-sm font-medium">Circuit ID</label>
        <input 
          {...register("circuitId")} 
          className="mt-1 block w-full border rounded-md p-2"
        />
        {errors.circuitId && (
          <p className="text-red-500 text-xs mt-1">{errors.circuitId.message}</p>
        )}
      </div>
      <button type="submit" className="bg-blue-600 text-white px-4 py-2 rounded">
        Save Provisioning Data
      </button>
    </form>
  );
};

The "Flows" Approach: Architecture Beyond Code#

Extracting a single lotus notes business rule is helpful, but Telecom VPs need to understand the entire ecosystem. This is where Replay's "Flows" feature becomes critical.

In a legacy environment, the "Order to Cash" process might span five different Lotus Notes databases. Manually mapping these dependencies is an 18-month project. Replay automates this by tracking the user journey across these disparate systems. It creates a visual architecture map (a Blueprint) that shows how data flows from a "Customer Request" form to a "Technical Provisioning" agent.

Visualizing Complex Telecom Workflows#

By recording a senior operator performing a "Service Upgrade" workflow, Replay captures:

• •The API calls (or Notes backend calls) triggered by UI actions.
• •The conditional logic that changes based on the customer's region.
• •The legacy "hooks" that need to be maintained during a phased migration.

This allows for Modernizing without rewriting from scratch, as you can replace the UI while keeping the mission-critical backend logic intact until it's ready for a full cloud-native transition.

Security and Compliance in Regulated Telecom#

For Telecom, Insurance, and Government sectors, "moving to the cloud" isn't a simple upload. These environments are heavily regulated. Replay is built for these high-security requirements:

• •SOC2 & HIPAA-Ready: Ensuring that the metadata captured during the reverse engineering process is handled with enterprise-grade security.
• •On-Premise Availability: For organizations with strict data residency requirements, Replay can operate entirely within your firewall.
• •Audit Trails: Every lotus notes business rule extracted is linked back to the original recording, providing a clear audit trail of why a piece of code exists.

Managing the Human Element: The "Shadow Documentation" Problem#

One of the biggest hurdles in legacy recovery is "Shadow Documentation"—the sticky notes and unofficial Excel sheets employees use to navigate the quirks of a broken Lotus Notes UI.

When you record these users with Replay, you aren't just capturing the code; you're capturing the intent. If a user always clicks "Cancel" then "Re-open" to fix a known bug in a Lotus Notes agent, Replay identifies that friction. The resulting React code doesn't just replicate the bug; it provides a clean implementation of the intended lotus notes business rule.

Example: Handling Complex State Logic#

Lotus Notes often uses "Profile Documents" to store global settings. In a modern React app, this is best handled via a Context Provider or a state management library like Zustand. Replay’s AI Automation Suite identifies these global state patterns and scaffolds the appropriate architecture.

typescript
// Replay-scaffolded Global State from Lotus Notes Profile Documents
import { create } from 'zustand';

interface TelecomState {
  regionCode: string;
  isRegulatoryOverrideActive: boolean;
  setRegion: (code: string) => void;
  toggleOverride: () => void;
}

export const useTelecomStore = create<TelecomState>((set) => ({
  regionCode: 'US-EAST',
  isRegulatoryOverrideActive: false,
  setRegion: (code) => set({ regionCode: code }),
  toggleOverride: () => set((state) => ({ 
    isRegulatoryOverrideActive: !state.isRegulatoryOverrideActive 
  })),
}));

The Path to 70% Time Savings#

The math for a Telecom VP is simple. If you have 200 mission-critical screens in your legacy portfolio:

• •Manual Rewrite: 200 screens x 40 hours = 8,000 hours of senior engineering time.
• •Replay Modernization: 200 screens x 4 hours = 800 hours of engineering time.

By automating the extraction of the lotus notes business rule logic, you free up your best developers to focus on innovation—like AI-driven churn prediction or 5G network optimization—rather than archeology.

Frequently Asked Questions#

How does Replay handle encrypted Lotus Notes data?#

Replay operates at the UI and workflow level. It records the interactions as seen by a user with authorized access. This means that if a user can see and interact with the data, Replay can document the underlying logic. It does not require direct access to encrypted NSF files at the byte level, making it a safer alternative for sensitive telecom data.

Can Replay extract @Formula logic as well as LotusScript?#

Yes. Because Replay uses Visual Reverse Engineering, it focuses on the outcome of the logic. Whether a lotus notes business rule is written in @Formula, LotusScript, or Java, Replay observes the input/output behavior and the resulting UI state changes to generate the equivalent React/TypeScript implementation.

What happens to our existing Design System?#

Replay is designed to accelerate your Component Library development. You can feed your existing Design System guidelines into Replay’s Blueprint editor, and the platform will ensure the generated React components adhere to your brand's styling, accessibility standards, and layout rules.

Is Replay an "AI wrapper" or a dedicated platform?#

Replay is a purpose-built Visual Reverse Engineering platform. While it includes an AI Automation Suite to help categorize and refactor code, its core strength lies in its proprietary engine that maps video recordings to structured component trees and state machines. It is built for enterprise-scale modernization, not just simple code generation.

How do we handle background agents that don't have a UI?#

While Replay excels at UI-driven logic recovery, background agents are typically mapped via our "Flows" feature. By observing the data changes that occur after a UI action, Replay helps architects identify which backend agents are triggered, allowing them to be systematically replaced by modern serverless functions or microservices.

Ready to modernize without rewriting? Book a pilot with Replay