Category Archives: #Domino2025

CollabSphere 2018 – Registration is Open

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, #IBMChampion, CollabSphere, Community, IBM/Lotus, MWLUG, Notes/Domino Leave a comment

The conference formally known as MWLUG (Mid-West Lotus User Group) is now renamed CollabSphere. This year the conference will be held in Ann Arbor, MI on July 23-25.

Visit the brand new website at www.collabsphere.org to learn more, to register for this very cost-efficient conference, or why not submit an abstract for a session?

I have been attending MWLUG for several years myself, and it is an excellent conference. High quality speakers presenting over 50 sessions and workshops, networking with representatives from IBM as well as with presenters and other attendees and an exhibit floor where sponsors and vendors are showing their products and services.

With IBM expanding its portfolio of products and services, and with the new innovations in the rejuvenated  Notes and Domino product line, this will be the conference to attend this summer. Expect some exciting news to be presented at CollabSphere, and to see more of the latest version of Domino, due to be released in the second half of 2018.

I hope to see you at CollabSphere, and perhaps even see you present!

Domino 10 is coming… in 2018!

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, IBM/Lotus, Notes/Domino, Uncategorized Leave a comment

IBM and HCL have promised to release Domino version 10 by the end of 2018. The other  week there was a joint webinar where some of the new features were discussed. If you missed this, there is a replay of it available. I will discuss some of the features in just a moment. But just look at the infographics below. There are so many new features already lined up.

The promise of Open IDEs means that we should be able to use more modern development tools. Hopefully the latest version of Eclipse, and maybe even Visual Code and/or Visual Studio. Those were frequently requested during the Domino 2025 jam. Support for OAuth authorization was also promised, as well as more REST APIs. Support for Loopback was mentioned.

There were even demos, despite HCL only being 8 weeks into the development. Quite a few features had already been developed earlier, at IBM, but were not released for one or another reason.

For being less than a month before the big IBM Think conference, where you would expect some big news to be presented, HCL and IBM did not hold back. This makes me very excited about what all we will get to see in Las Vegas later this month.

So what all did we get to hear about and see last week?

Let’s go directly to Domino. A new file format, called NSF-2 is being discussed, and we were promised an increase of the maximum file size from 64 GB to 256 GB per database. This is very welcome. DAOS has been a stopgap, helping when the database contains a large number of attachments. But when you have a very large number of documents, you previously had to split them into multiple databases. 

While on the subject of a lot of documents, IBM is planning to overhaul the search as well, using elastic search (ES or E-Search as IBM calls it) to search even faster in large data sets. Even more support for running Domino in Docker containers is planned, including Docker Enterprise images. Domino running on Raspberry Pi?

For me as developer, the most exciting news is that Domino will support Node.js. HCL promised a full node.js implementation, so you can use the package manager npm within Domino. It also sounds like HCL is at least thinking about ways to implement support for Git. This is huge, and it will give Notes/Domino developers access to modern tools and functionality. But not only that, it will be easier for Domino customers to find expertise in the form of developers, as node.js is a very popular framework. In addition, Domino developers will learn new technologies, making them more attractive on the market.

 

During the Q&A session afterwards, the representatives for both IBM and HCL promised even more cool features to be presented at IBM Think in Las Vegas, coming up next week. Among what is to be presented is a brand new roadmap and a list of the features requested during the Domino 2025 jams earlier this year. I can’t wait to see what is in store for Domino.

There are several sessions covering Domino 10, and you can bet I will be in the audience! I hope to see you in Las Vegas next week.

 

 

Will I see you at IBM Think?

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, #IBMChampion, App Modernization, Community, Connect, IBM/Lotus, Lotusphere, Notes/Domino, Watson Leave a comment

It is just over a month until IBM kicks off Think 2018 in Las Vegas. This conference takes place March 19-21 and merges several conferences, including IBM Connect (formerly known as Lotusphere).

After attending 19 Lotusphere/Connect conferences in Orlando (as well as one in Nice and one in San Francisco), I am ready for something new and exciting. IBM Think brings in many different parts of the IBM portfolio into one big conference, where we can learn about new and exciting technologies that we may not been exposed to before. I am looking forward to learning more about AI, security, blockchain, IoT and much more.

But I am of course also excited to learn about the upcoming Notes and Domino 10. IBM and HCL has promised too show actual working code at Think, and will present a timeline not only for what features we will see in the end of the year in Domino 10, but also in upcoming versions.

I have a feeling we will finally see functions and features people have been requesting for many years. A large part of the IBM:ers who worked on Notes and Domino moved over to HCL late last year, and I suspect they have been very busy. Here is an excerpt of a session description:

For those of you who want to integrate Domino applications into modern web applications and cloud platforms like Salesforce, etc., we will show you how. Domino is embracing JavaScript, Node.js and open source to become a full-stack web development platform anyone you hire off the street today can be productive in.

If anyone is interested in attending IBM Think I have a special promo code that will give you a $100 discount. Contact me at texasswede@gmail.com (use the subject “IBM Think Promo Code”) and I will mail you a code. You can also contact any other IBM Champion for a code.

See you in Las Vegas in a month!

 

Domino 10 and Beyond – my thoughts

Posted on by Posted in #Domino2025, #IBMChampion, App Modernization, IBM/Lotus, Javascript, Lotusscript, Notes/Domino, Watson, Web Development 5 Comments

It has now been a little over a month since IBM announced the new direction of IBM Notes, Domino, Verse and Sametime. I have been thinking through what I think this means for the product and the ecosystem of third-party tools and business partners. Some people view the move of development from IBM to HCL Technologies as an abandonment of the product family. But that is not how I see it.

IBM has, despite their size, limited resources to dedicate to development of the Domino family of products. They have new products and services they are trying to bring to market, and by having HCL take over the development and add more resources, this is a win both for IBM and for Notes/Domino.

With more developers dedicated to the product, I expect to see more frequent updates and new features added quicker than we have been used to the last 5-6 years. The product management and future direction of the platform is still managed by IBM, but with more non-IBM resources at their hands I hope the product managers will be able to push harder for the addition of new technology and updates, bringing Domino back to a first class development platform.

Domino was an outstanding product, but for the last 6-8 years the innovation mostly stopped. New technologies were not added at the pace they were adapted by the rest of the world, and the support for new protocols like TLS 1.2 was lagging. IBM also but on Dojo as the framework for XPages, while the rest of the world mostly went to jQuery.

But if IBM allows HCL to update some aging parts and add new functions, requested by the community, I can see this being a great platform. And IBM says they will listen to the community and the users. Starting this month, IBM is bringing the Domino 2025 Jam to four cities in North America: Toronto on 12/8, Dublin (Ohio) on 12/13, Chicago on 12/14 and Dallas on 12/15. here will also be several events in Europe as well as a virtual Jam sometime in the future.

At the Domino 2025 Jam developers and users will be able to suggest what features they find important, what needs to be fixed, and where they want to see the product go in the future. I don’t think the Jam will have a huge impact on the upcoming Domino 10 release next year, but it may help IBM prioritize where to put their effort. Where I see the Domino 2025 Jam being helpful is in the longer timeframe, especially if it is repeated every 12 to 18 months to verify that the product direction is still what the market is looking for.

I also would like to see IBM addressing at least the most requested changes on IdeaJam.

Let me describe some of the functions and features I want to see in an upcoming version of IBM Domino.

Javascript Everywhere

For the last 20+ years we have mainly been using Lotusscript, both in the client and for agents on the server. It is a powerful language, but if you have been working with other more modern languages (Lotusscript is based on Visual Basic) there are many limitations and functions you are missing.

I would like to see Javascript made into a fully supported language everywhere. Both in the client and on the server. Add support for jQuery, to make it easy to address elements, and create a Javascript API to complement the Lotusscript functions.

In addition to making it easier to create and parse JSON (used in and by most web applications today), it would open up the product to new developers who may come from a more traditional web development background.

I would love to see Lotusscript get a modernization, but I doubt that will happen. In order to improve Lotusscript, a quite lot of changes are needed. Instead I think the future improvements should be on the Javascript API side.

External API

Any modern product needs a public API so other tools and applications can integrate with it. I would like to see support in Domino for LoopBack, like IBM is doing in LiveGrid. When you create a view, there would be a matching API created to create, read, update and delete documents, as well as list all records, perform searches, etc.

But there should also be additional more specialized API:s available, perhaps the most common functions should be exposed as API calls out of the box.

Integration with External Services

Notes and Domino also needs integration with external services, e.g IBM Watson, Mongo DB or Node-RED. Why not support for IFFTT? Expose the calendar as a Google Calendar feed. But also make it easy to connect external services to Notes and Domino. Make it easy to use Oauth 2.0 to login to a Domino-hosted service and vice versa.

New Domino Designer

Unlink Domino Designer from the Notes client. Create a Eclipse plug-in (and make sure it stays updated to work with new versions of Eclipse). This will help new developers to start working with Domino, using tools they are already familiar with. The goal should be that someone familiar with Javascript should be able to open Eclipse and start writing code for Domino, and the only thing they need to learn is the Domino Object Model.

Add ready-to-use web components/plugins, so the developer can easily add for example a name-lookup into Domino Directory or a date/time selector. Support CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, and make it easy to modify the look of the applications.

Notes Client

The Notes client makes it easy to quickly build applications. You get a lot of the core functionality of the applications “for free”, like views, forms, etc. But you are also limited in how the application looks. You can change the look of views somewhat by selecting background colors, fonts and a few other attributes. On forms you can select between two different looks for some of the fields, while other fields can not be modified at all. What I would like to see is a way to easily restyle everything by using CSS. Then you can make the forms and views look much more modern. Let the developer create “themes”, a set of CSS rules and perhaps images that can be applied to new applications in seconds. These themes could be published online, for other developers to use.

These are just some of the ideas I have for improvements to Domino. What are you ideas?