The first entry on my blog could not be other than the recap of the most important Domino event on Eurpe, the “Engage” (former BLUG, Belux Lotus User Group) that I attended together with my partner in Data101, Dominique Perarnaud.
The event was at the Royal Burgers’ Zoo. One of the strengths of this event is the location that is selected each year by its organizer, [Theo Heselmans] (https://twitter.com/theoheselmans). This year a Zoo, last year the Automobile Museum in Belgium, the previous year on a boat in Netherlands, … Where will it be next year?
In 2020, the “leitmotif” by HCL has been the term “Evolve“, with which they have wanted to demonstrate that they are going to continue the 2019 main direction and they are going to improve on innovation in all products, in addition to adding some more to the main portfolio.
An example of of this are the news regarding the Nomad product. In addition to the world of the smartphone (ios and Android) they revealed that there will be a Nomad client for the web. In a relatively short time we will be able to run the Notes client from the web without prior installation and with continous updates.
Another product to be talked about is Volt, the high-level and low-code Domino application development environment. Basically, it is a “port” of the “Leap” tool (included in the IBM software purchase package) that allows application development visually without having programming knowledge.
Regarding the AppDevPack module, Andrew Manby and Andre Davis announced a special feature which will be very useful, such as the possibility of executing agents from NodeJs, in addition to the possibility of managing “RichTextItem” type items.
Another new project they comment that it still in development, is the Keep Project. In general terms, this new technology could be described as a way to create access points to the data stored on a Domino server through configuration. Paul Withers and Stephan Wissel dedicated a session to talk about it.
No Xpages this year. Already last year there were few sessions in this regard and most of them focused on the migration of applications developed in XPages to other platforms such as Node or Java EE. We do not know if there will be news on this platform in the future (remember that HCL will continue to maintain Xpages in future versions), but it seems not in the short or medium term.
With all these news and announcements, in my opinion HCl has opted for a clear line out of developing application with HCL Designer. We see more technologies or application development possibilities in HCL Domino in a different line from what has been its traditional ecosystem.
Outside of development, many new products were announced, such as [HCL Sametime] (http://www.dperarnaud.es/hcl-sametime-v11.html), HCL Connections, HCL Verse, HCL DX, .. .
In general, this year’s attendees were overwhelmed by the number of improvements and new features and the speed of HCL in making them available. With each passing year, end customers and partners become more confident in HCL’s work. Hopefully they are not too late.
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