CollabSphere 2019 – Less than five weeks left!

If you haven’t registered yet for CollabSphere in Boston, time is starting to run out. The conference starts in less than five (5)  weeks, and the special price for the rooms at the conference hotel is only guaranteed until October 4.

If you haven’t been to CollabSphere, or its predecessor MWLUG, you have been missing out. It is a very inexpensive confernece (only $100 this year, thanks to generous sponsors), with high quality speakers for the sessions and workshops. The opportunity to network with other customers, business partners and representatives from IBM/HCL is incredibly valuable, in my opinion. There are both organized and impromptu social events during the conference, as well as before and after for the ones arriving early or leaving late.

If you are in the New England area, there is no reason you should not attend CollabSphere, now when it is taking place on HCL’s home turf, where many of the developers live and work.

With Domino 11 coming out at the end of the year, I am sure we can expect some very interesting and exciting announcements at this year’s conference. And don’t miss HCL Day on Monday, with a large number of sessions covering everything from their Cloud Program, the changes to licensing, the HCL Customer Advocacy Program, and much more.

I hope to see you at CollabSphere, especially at my session on Tuesday at 2.00pm, where I will talk about Node-RED and show some cool things you can do with it.

 

 

 

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HCL Software Creates Portal for Customers and Partners

HCL_Software_PortalHCL Software today launched a brand new portal for customers and partners. HCL Software is a part of HCL Technologies, and this new division was announced as late as yesterday (June 1, 2019) at the same time as HCL announced that the purchase of IBM’s collaboration products had been completed.

The new portal is built using Domino and Portal, and provides customers and partners a place where they can receive product information, learn about purchasing software, get support, connect with partners, and much more.

If you are a customer of IBM Notes, Domino, Sametime, Verse or Connections, or if you are a Business Partner, go to http://bit.ly/mlnHCLw3 and sign up. At the moment the sign-up is disabled, due to the acquisition. But I would suggest to check back in a few days.

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HCL has impressed me!

It has now been just over four months since it was announced that HCL would purchase the IP (intellectual property) of Notes, Domino, Sametime, Connections, Verse, Traveler, and several other products from IBM.

When the announcement was made in 2017 that HCL would take over development and support of Notes and Domino, many IBM:ers with long experience of developing the products moved over to HCL. I talked to several of them back then, and also at the Factory Tour in July 2018. The excitement was amazing to see, it took me back to the days of Lotusphere in the early 2000’s. They were all very excited about the new opportunity to create new functions and expand/modernize the products. Very quickly the development of Domino 10 took off.

Another thing that impress me is how HCL seeks feedbacks from customers and business partners. Even as HCL is hiring on a large number of new developers, there are still limitations on what they can accomplish. It is very clear that they want to build a product for the customers, and they need to know where to focus their development efforts.  HCL and IBM held a number of jams during the first half of 2018, both online and physically around the world, where customers and business partners could give feedback on functionality and priorities.

On October 10, 2018 Domino 10 was released, with many of the improvements requested implemented. Some additional functions, like the support for node.js, were released a few months later.  I think the decision not to rush out everything is the right one. As a developer, I want all the functions right now, or even better yesterday. But at the same time, I want it to work properly. HCL has done a good job at balancing this, at least this far. I want HCL to continue working this way.

The development of Notes and Domino 11 has already started. As a matter of fact, HCL started working on that version even before Domino 10 was released. Several Domino 11 jams have been taking place already, withmore to come. Version 11 will focus on the client, while version 10 had the focus on the server and development functionality. But we developers have things to look forward to in Notes 11 as well.

One of the items IBM and HCL have been talking about is low-code/no-code rapid development. This is something that we are promised to be available in Domino 11, as a browser-based development environment. It would bring the power of Notes and Domino development back to the “citizen developers”, allowing regular business users to be able to build custom applications/solution without writing any code. This used to be a strength of Notes in earlier versions, but in the late 1990’s IBM moved the development functions from the regular Notes client into a separate IDE, Domino Designer. This took away the ability for regular users to build their own solution, and made them have to rely on the IT department or dedicated developers to build applications. Bringing this back would give a new generation of users access to this powerful platform.

I think it is very important that the new low-code development functionality work seamlessly with traditional Domino development, like HCL is aiming for. Imagine a user in the accounting department who comes up with an ide for an application that would improve their efficiency. The user begins to build a simple application using the Domino low-code/no-code environment. Perhaps a form or two, some simple views and a simple workflow. The development is done in a sectioned off part of the server, as the regular users don’t have access to create database/applications in the general Domino data location. Data is then loaded though an import from an Excel spreadsheet,

When the first iteration of the application is done, the user shows the result to the CFO, who loves it. But there are a couple of functions that would be nice to have, like integration with another, existing Domino application. This is something that the IT department and their developers need to handle. So the application is handed over to them. IT takes a look at the application, and either leaves it in the end-user area on the server or move it over to the general data storage. The assigned developer then opens up Domino Designer or perhaps even Visual Studio Code, and add the code needed. The developer only spends a fraction of the development time previously needed, as the end user already built much of the infrastructure of the application. Another benefit is that the developer does not need to collect requirements for how the full application needs to work, only the small part they are modifying/adding.

The application is updated, and the users can start using it. The IT manager is happy, as the developer only spent an hour or two on the project instead of a couple of days, and can now be moved on to the next project. The CFO and end-users are happy because they got their application built quickly, without having to wait for IT to get the bandwidth to develop a complete application, and they can improve their efficiency and get more done quicker.

If HCL can deliver a low-code/no-code solution like this, perhaps with data storage not only in Domino .NSF files but also with connections to other data stores like perhaps SQL and Mongo DB, this could be an amazing collaborative development platform, where end-users and professional developers work together on improving the application landscape of their company.

I can’t wait to see what HCL delivers later this year!

 

 

 

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We live in interesting times.

Yesterday it was announced that HCL Technologies will purchase the IP (intellectual property) of seven IBM-owned products, including Notes/Domino, Sametime and Connections, for a total of 1.8 billion dollar.

HCL and IBM already had a partnership on the product development side, with HCL doing the development and support with IBM still owning the products and handling sales and marketing. Now HCL is fully in charge of the product, and is not tied down by what IBM decides.

As soon as the HCL-IBM agreement was announced last year, HCL aggressively went on the offensive. They announced not one but two additional versions of Notes and Domino. Domino 10 was delivered just two months ago, and version 11 is promised in 2019.

HCL reached out to business partners and IBM Champions, as well as to the rest of the user community, to get feedback about what features were the most critical. Despite the quick release of Domino 10, a number of suggested features were included, as were several other impressive improvements.

Notable among these features is the new (and extremely fast) Domino Query Language as we as support for node.js through the domino-db module. On the administration side there were several improvements that will lower the TCO (total cost of ownership).

HCL has already announced several so called Jams in the near future to collect feedback on what the users want to see in the upcoming Domino 11.

So what does yesterday’s announcement mean for the future of Notes, Domino and Connections? I belive it will be extremely beneficial. HCL can take the products where they want them, adding functions requested by small and medium sized businesses instead of focusing on what a few very large customers wants, which is what IBM seemed to do.

By adding back low-code/no-code development into the core product, the citizen developers can again be engaged to create simple applications for their own or their department’s use. If they then need more advanced functions they can hand the application over to a traditional developer for further enhancements. This is what Notes looked like in the beginning, back in the early to mid 90’s. This is the strength of the platform, and what brought it its success.

The weakness of Notes and Domino has always been IBM:s (seemingly) lack of understanding of the product, and how it fits smaller and medium sized businesses. By going back to the original use of Domino, combined with HCL:s focus on on-premises (as opposed to IBM:s attempt to move everything to the cloud, despite what the customers want), I think HCL can bring a new life to Notes and Domino, and combine Collaborations into the mix. I can see an upcoming release of Collaboration where the data lives in a Domino database.

So for any Domino and Connections customers and business partners, I think the future looks bright. My belief is that HCL will bring new life and new functionality into the products.

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#DominoForever – Release Day

Finally it is here, the new version of IBM Domino. After the world premiere yesterday in Frankfurt, the world-wide launch is taking place today.

The focus in this release is on application development and administration. Features like self-healing of databases and increase of the maximum database size to 256 GB are among the most popular with administrators, while developers have a number of exciting additions.

The two most talked about features are the new Domino Query Language and node.js integration with Domino. Domino Query Language has been written from the bottom up to be fast, and the demonstrations I have seen confirms this. It is fast, very fast! And it can handle searches that would not only take a long time to create in earlier versions of Domino, but would take forever to run. Now the result comes back in a second, or even less. This really blew my mind when I first saw it earlier this year. John Curtis, the engineer that pretty much single handed wrote this code, did an amazing job, fully on par with when Damien Katz rewrote the formula language in ND6 and increased the performance several times over.

The second big feature of Domino 10 is the integration with node.js through the domino-db connector. It will be delivered in a separate application development pack, which will enter beta this week. This is a slight disappointment, I had been hoping this functionality would be available at the launch. But I rather wait the time that is needed for IBM and HCL to make it a fully stable product, instead of rushing something unfinished to the market.

Another product announced today was Notes for iPad, which makes it possible to run existing Notes applications unmodified on an iPad. All the functions we know and love are supported, like replication, offline access to applications, Lotusscript, Formula language, and more.

To support mobile Notes applications, there are enhancements in Lotusscript, for example camera and GPS support. Lotusscript has also been extended with other new classes, for HTTP requests and JSON parsing directly in native Lotusscript. No need to call Java or system API:s anymore!

HCL has done an amazing job in a short time, and Domino is on its way to become a very powerful and extendable platform for modern web development. A company can now not only deploy their existing business applications on iPads, they can also hire young developers who have experience of node.js and modern frameworks/libraries like Angular and React, and have them develop new solutions that can access existing data in Domino databases. Why use Mongo DB for data storage, when you have the much more secure Domino server available?

Domino 10 is not the end point. Domino 11 will be out next year, and IBM/HCL have committed to a long future for Domino. Forget #domino2025, now it is #DominoForever!

If you were not able to attend any of the launch events, here is the live stream from Frankfurt :

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=310707186390803&id=111720058922703

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