In the 7th of my Perfect10 webcasts I jump ahead to “What Can I Do In Advance” to talk about Beta testing. Beta versions of the v10 products are due this summer in a publicly available release so now is the time to start planning what you will do.
Next Up: Upgrade Priorities and Dependencies
If this blog is tl:dr then here’s your takeaway
I can’t thank everyone at HCL enough for throwing open the doors and leaving them open. Together we will continue to innovate great things for customers
Last week Tim and I were invited to the 1st CWP Factory tour held by HCL at their offices in Chelmsford. “CWP” stands for “Collaboration Workflow Platform” and includes not only the products HCL took over from IBM late last year such as Domino, Traveler, Verse on Premises and Sametime but also new products that HCL are developing as extensions of those. These (that I can talk a little bit about) such as HCL Nomad (Notes for iPad) and HCL Places (a new client runnvetaing against Domino 10 and providing integrated collaborative services such as chat, AV , web and Notes applications) will be leapfrogging Domino far over its competitors.
I want to start by thanking HCL for inviting us inside to see their process. We met and made our voices heard with more than 30 developers and executives, all of who wanted to know “do you like this?” “what are we missing?”. I came away from the two days with a to-do list of my own at the request of various people to send in more details of problems or requirements I had mentioned when there. John Paganetti, who is also a customer advocate at HCL, hosted the “ask the developers” impromptu session (we had so many questions so they threw one into the agenda on day 2). We were told to get to know and reach out directly to the teams with our feedback and questions. If you don’t have a route to provide feedback and want one then please reach out.
Back in February I attended a Domino Jam hosted by Andrew Manby (@andrewmanby) from IBM in London. These were held all over the world and attendees were pushed to brainstorm around features that were missing or needed. That feedback was used to create priorities for v10 and many of the features requested at my session and others have appeared in the current beta and are committed to a v10 release. At the end of the 2nd day of the factory tour we again had a Domino Jam hosted by Andrew Manby but this time for Domino 11 features – wheeeeeeee! With the Jams and the Destination Domino blog as well as the #domino2025 hashtag activity, IBM are really stepping up to the products in a way they haven’t in several years. I want to recognise the hard work being done by Andrew, by Uffe Sorensen, and by Mat Newman amongst others, to make this IBM/HCL relationship work.
So what was the factory tour? It was a 2 day conference held at HCL’s (still being built) offices. I am pleased to say it was put together very informally, we were split into groups of about 10 (hi Daniel, Francie, Julian, Richard, Paul, Nathan, Devin, Fabrice!) and one by one the development teams came and took our feedback on the work they are doing. We worked with the Verse (on premises) team, the TCO team (looking at the Domino and Sametime servers), the Notes client team, the Nomad team and the Application Development team. It was an intense day in a good way with so much information being shared with us and questions being asked of us. It was also good to be told that the majority of what we saw and discussed could be shared publicly.
A few highlights (out of many) from the two days that were new to me:
In this 6th episode of my #Perfect10 webcast I look at how to identify any performance issues in your Sametime, iNotes, Verse on Premises or Traveler environments prior to upgrade.
Next Up: Preparing for Beta Testing
Here’s a good thing.. an interesting (free) 2 day event being held by IBM in Dublin on Workspace development and IBM Design Thinking. If Watson Workspace is something you are working with or interested in they will have designers and developers on hand to help you work through ideas. Unfortunately I will be in the US then or I’d definitely be signed up.
Take a look and register here
In this 5th episode of my #Perfect10 webcast I look at how to identify any performance issues in your Domino environment prior to upgrade. Assuming most people will be doing an in place upgrade, we want to resolve or at minimum document any existing issues before starting
In this 4th webcast in my #Perfect10 series I discuss system requirements for v10 of Domino, Sametime and Traveler. Yes I know we don’t know those yet and we don’t even have the beta but we do know some things that are coming and more importantly this is something you should do before any major upgrade regardless. If we want an upgrade to be successful we don’t want it dragged down by old or outdated architecture and operating systems.
It runs a little bit longer than I like at 19 minutes I had a lot of information to cram in. I’m sure you can speed me up to 1.5x if you want to save a few minutes 🙂 As always if you have any feedback or would like me to do a webcast on a specific aspect please let me know.
On today’s #Perfect10 webcast I show how to audit and analyse your Notes client installs in preparation for the v10 upgrade later this year. Understanding how many clients you have active , what versions they are running, how they are installed and on what platforms is going to be a significant part of your upgrade planning.
This week was the Engage conference held in Rotterdam – the largest and (IMO) best event Theo Heselmans has given us yet. Rotterdam is a lovely city and the water taxi that took us from the restaurant back to the boat last night turned a 5 minute ride into a James Bond chase sequence – at several points he took corners by tilting the boat almost entirely on its side (there goes Tim!) and then onto the other side (bye Mike!) before pulling a handrake turn and reversing up to the dock – worth every cent of four and a half Euro. I don’t usually find time to attend sessions beyond the keynotes because I get caught up presenting and doing other things (I find it hard to think what right now but let’s group it under “meeting people”) but this week I was rushing from presentation to round table to meetup so here’s a summary of my highlights, kept as short as I can so you aren’t tempted to tl:dr
HCL brought the energy, the enthusiasm and a huge team of people showing how far they have taken Domino, Notes, Traveler, Sametime , Verse on Premises etc. IBM had energy too but their focus was Connections/Workspace and although it continues to develop, we in the ICS community have been starved for progress on the other products. HCL together with IBM hosted several roundtables on Domino, Application Development, Notes Client, Verse on Premises etc where we got to ask for or complain about what we wanted or felt was missing and answer questions about design priorities. I won’t go through all of that other than to apologise to everyone else in the Domino/Sametime roundtable who didn’t get a word in once I started.
From that Domino round table we heard about a couple of much needed and unexpected features coming in v10 (both of which I think are so new they haven’t yet been named) around the area of TCO. One is what I’d call a sync feature for Domino where you can tell a server to keep specific folders in sync with other servers in its cluster. Those folders could contain NSFs but also NLOs (DAOS files), HTML files or really anything else. The server will create the missing files and it doesn’t use replication to do that. Even better, if the server detects a NSF file corruption it is capable of removing its own instance of the file and pulling a new one from a cluster mate – all without any admin intervention. Another great tool will be the idea of shared encryption keys for NLO files so that Server B will be able to copy even encrypted NLO files from Server A by decrypting and then re-encrypting them. Management and maintenance of NLOs and the DAOS catalog was high on my list of enhancement requests.
From the Application round table we heard about how the integration with Node and Domino will work, there will be a npm install – DominoDB that will allow Node developers to access Domino data via the Node front end. Queries to Domino from the Node server will be using high performance gRPC (remote procedure calls) – in the same way Notes and Domino use NRPC for proprietary access. The gRPC access used by Node for Domino will eventually be open source. The front end of the Node server will be surfaced using the Loopback API gateway.
Essentially what this means is that any developer who can program using Node will be able to use their existing skills against Domino NSFs. That Domino systems will, in one step, become accessible to a much wider group of developers and systems is the main application development goal.
Domino statistics and reporting can be uploaded into and analysed from within the New Relic platform. If you find this as interesting as I do then you too are clearly an administrator,
HCL Places. So that was a surprise. HCL demoed a working (but very basic) prototype of a new product they had been developing in secret (well no-one in the room knew of it). A lightweight desktop collaboration client that runs against a Domino NSF. It can include mail,, sametime , video, mentions and Notes applications. All on premises. Here is a terrible image of the prototype which – yes I know is cluttered – but focus on the features not the look and you can see that HCL are trying to take Domino somewhere we’ve all known it could go but never had the chance. The image was shared out by Jason Roy Gary who built and demonstrated the prototype and whose role at HCL is (I think) Vice President Engineering and Innovation, Collaborative Workflow Platforms.
In a week full of good news the two best were that a beta program for v10 will start with phase 1 in June and phase 2 in July. June will be a closed beta and July open. If you want to register for the beta program when it is announced then sign up for the newsletter on the Destination Domino site here
Plus there was this .
I don’t want to minimise the contribution by IBM themselves at Engage, each of the roundtables included IBM’ers alongside HCL’ers and there was certainly plenty of activity around Connections and Workplace but right now, in this blog, I’m revelling in the fact that Domino is finally getting the attention it deserves. Plus look at these great pens – they have little yellow highlighters in the top and when I asked IBM if I could buy some for customers they were happy to give me a “few”.
So – long story (it could have been sooo much longer) short. A great week , I learnt a lot, my session on Docker was standing room only in boiling heat, I had the chance to talk to people I rarely get to talk to and Engage was in another great location. I don’t know how Theo will match this next year but I look forward to finding out. Plus I got chocolate as a speaker gift.
Now don’t go messing with my high.
Following on from our presentation at IBM Think, on Thursday May 24th I will be presenting a follow up webcast with Ram Krishnamurthy, Chief Architect, Notes, Designer and Xpages (HCL) and Andrew Manby, Director of Project Management (IBM). On the webcast we will be showing the latest additions to Notes client mail, calendaring and Verse on Premises all of which comes from live code and will ship with v10 of each product later this year.
If you saw our presentation at Think there have been more additions and changes since then – the speed at which the products are being developed is something I haven’t seen before and there are some great new features and UI changes I think you will like.
We have a lot of content to cover in 45 minutes and Andrew will have some news you will want to hear too so go here to register for the webcast starting 10am EST, this Thursday the 24th of May.
If you want to stay up to date with all the changes happening to Domino, Sametime, Traveler, Verse and other products then keep an eye on the Destination Domino site where all the news and announcements appear first, and while you’re there why ot sign up for the newsletter.
As we all get ready for v10 of the products later this year I will be blogging more of my own preparation work on my blog at https://turtleblog.info and also populating a Youtube playlist called Perfect10 with a series of 10’ish minute videos to help you prepare.
In today’s edition of my #Perfect10 webcast I discuss some steps in finding your Traveler, Sametime, iNotes or VOP servers along with verifying who may be using them.
The Turtle Partnership Blog 