IBM today announced that support for IBM Notes and Domino 9.0.1 have been extended until September 30, 2021, five years from now. Like many others I would have liked to see IBM use the wording “at least until 2021”, but I am sure IBM’s lawyers have something to do with this. It is important to notice that this is not an end-of-life announcement,
At the same time IBM also announced that they now will start shipping new features for the products in the Notes and Domino product line without changing the version number like before. In the past only bug fixes were shipped between version in so called “fix packs”. Any new features had to wait until a new version was released. But recently some new features have been added as well, causing some confusion. In the future IBM will shift to more frequent updates , using the name Feature Packs. Many cloud offerings don’t even do version numbers anymore (what version of Gmail are you using?), and Microsoft is doing the same thing with Windows 10, pushing out new features within the same version number.
Also today IBM announced Fix Pack 7 (FP7), probably the last fix pack version before the name change to Feature Pack. It can be download as of today. You can read more about what is new here.
In an upcoming feature release IBM is expected to update the JVM to Java 8, as well as add new functions needed for Verse on-promises which is planned for release at the end of the year.