IBM and HCL, who took over the development of the old IBM Collaboration Solutions portfolio a few months back, minus IBM Connections, held a joint webinar today to present their plans for IBM Notes/Domino v10. You can see the recording of the webinar here.
The people who held the webinar were Bob Schultz, GM IBM Collaborative Solutions & Talent, Andrew Manby, Director IBM Product Management Collaboration Solutions and Richard Jefts, GM/VP HCL Collaborative Solutions. The idea is that contrary to what IBM did before, the whole process towards a finished release of Domino 10 will be transparent. And this is just the first part of the new regime of information. There will be more webinars, blog postings and information sessions at the IBM Think conference, as well as at user group meetings.
The main points of what is coming in Domino 10:
- Slimmer, faster and better looking Notes client
- Missing mail features will be added
- Better Microsoft integration for mail and productivity applications
- Use of modern development tools and frameworks
- Better core performance and functionality
- Easy to use authentication and administration
- Even better integration with Outlook and Sametime
- There will be a lot of new development on the mobile experience, both for mail and apps
- The Sametime client will from now on give you persistent chats through all platforms (about time!)
The most important details they gave us about Domino:
- Active Directory integration made much simpler (how I wish that had been the case 3 years ago)
- 256 GB NSF-files!
- Automated database repair
- Replica and synch-up and currency monitoring
- Full text auto update on search and resilience
- Docker Enterprise Edition images will be available
- ID/Vault management improvements
- SAML IPD upgrades (including ADFS4.0) for single signon
- A much improved API which makes it easier to read from and write to NSF files
- Exchange Web Services to connect to Exchange and Outlook clients in a much better way than today
We were given a short demo of some of the Notes functionality, but thus far a new design of the client was nowhere to be seen. New Notes functionality highlights:
- You can edit rich text fields in Word instead of Notes
- You can schedule (ie: delay) emails
- You can mark several emails and send them as attachments in a new email
- You an now invite other s to an appointment or meeting
Something a lot of developers and Javascript fans no doubt will cheer for is that Node.js will be added to the Domino development environment. This will make it much faster and easier to develop modern solutions, both in the Notes client and on mobile and web.
Jason Gary then did a guest appearance and showed how he used Node.js and the REST API to write and read from a very simple nsf-file.
Domino 10 will be released in the second half of 2018. And yes, there will be a beta plan announced. I’ll sign up for it, no doubt.
So, what do you think? Will this make a difference? Will Notes/Domino still have a future? Leave your comments and feedback below.