For the first time in several years, there was a usergroup meeting in Norway again. Lots of new announcements regarding Domino was presented. Here’s my report.
A few years back I closed down the Nordic usergroup (which used to be the Norwegian) for various reasons. Then last year Wannes Rams called me and asked me if I would be ok with him and my good friend Arne Nielsen starting it up again. Of course I didn’t mind, and they’ve already had several conferences in Sweden and Denmark. On Tuesday October 22nd they finally returned to Oslo, where we met up at The Mini Bottle Gallery a most excellent venue.
After I was given the task of running the one Domino server we have left at my employer, I find myself being dragged back into the Notes/Domino environment again. I don’t mind that one bit, even if my main job these days is Microsoft 365, in addition to writing and photography.
Here are a few highlights from the event.
The Current Status
Richard Jefts, Vice President and General Manager of HCL’s Digital Solutions business, started with a summary of the state of the union:
- Last quarter was the best quarter for HCL Digital since HCL took over the collaboration portfolio from IBM
- There’s a lot of traction in Africa and Asia
- Many companies have returned to Domino and have started to leverage MX Go and Leap
- We are seeing a shift from cloud to using more hybrid solutions and private clouds
- Product strategy for Domino is called Domino+:
- HCL Domino – Focus on value propositions
- HCL Verse – Lead with customer adoption and consumption
- HCL Sametime – Building new experiences
- HCL Nomad – Building new experiences
- HCL Leap – Extending your Domino+ capabilities
- Several big customers were referenced as big users of Domino, and I was happy to see my old customer from my iSi days, Gjerde, was mentioned
- Richard was clear about the fact that MX Go was NOT meant to replace Domino, and that their commitment to the Domino platform was stronger than ever.
- 30% of their customers have upgraded to V14
- 14.5 will be released in June 2025
- Connections will see a new push of updates and development (I was very surprised by this)
- He announced HCL Domino IQ (more about that later)
- Project Comet is a installable client which integrates HCL’s web based products & others (I wish we had learned more about this one)
Thomas Hampel and Tim Clark from HCL talked about the following subjects.
Leap
A product that makes it easy to for anyone to develop apps and used to be known as Volt.
- Leap is for citizen development
- Admin capabilities to monitor and control environment
- Domino Leap adds integration with Domino directory, databases and rich text
- New features for
- Foundry integration
- Custom widgets
- Improved productivity
- Usability improvements
- Custom widgets
Nomad
Nomad is a secure client which makes it possible to run your Notes client in a web browser, on a pad or on a smart phone. It also has the possibility to do offline replication.
Here are some of the newest updates:
- Information box now allows access to workspace, database and document properties
- Restyle, which makes it possible for you to automatically update the design of your old Notes applications automatically, has some new stuff:
- You can choose design themes from a shared database
- Shared fields and columns will also be restyled now
- Users can optionally apply updated icons for action buttons and view column icons
- Restyle only selected portions of the Notes application
- Subforms are now a separate option
- The restyle dialog displays the name and date time of the most recently restyle
- When you add new design elements after a restyle, they will get the new style
- New options for creating custom application icons
- On Nomad web you can now run the Designer (so you Mac heads can now use the designer on your computers without having to use VMWare and Windows)
- You can send mail offline
- Support for Let’s Encrypt
- More languages are now supported
- File attachments are noe also supported in Firefox
- The color picker has been updated so that you can define your own colors
Coming up are:
- Xpages launch options are now handled
- COM-integration
- File system access
- Picklist search constraints (contains)
- Sametime integration
Domino IQ
A lot of people have wondered how HCL plan to handle AI in the Domino portfolio. A new product called Domino IQ is on the way.
- It’s going to be a trusted LLM engine, running locally in your environment.
- It’s built into Domino and is not something you have to purchase as an extra license
- It’s accessible to all Domino developers
- You can Al enable your app/data in minutes
- Your data is only processed in your Domino environment and not online with a third-party
- Explore available LLM models from Huggingface.co
- Supports Llama v3.1, Mistral, Gemma 2 and more
- Integrated RAG support for easy customisation
Scenarios where this could be used:
- Create new emails based on your input
- Create a reply based on previous mail threads and conversations
- Rephrase text or emails
- Identify sensitive information before sending it out
- Analyse and prioritise your work
- Calendar analysis for reports from meetings
- Extract tasks and create To dos from meetings
- Analysis of servers for admins
- Improve or write code
- Build a new app based on your descriptions
From what I understand, Domino IQ will be available from v 14.5.
Of course, you will need more CPU, memory and GPU for this to work. Minimum is 1 CPU Core, 4GB Ram, 2GB Storage but a typical setup would be 4 CPU Cores, 16 GB Ram and 500 GB Storage (or whatever you might need). It’s still a lot less more than what a Microsoft Exchange server demands.
Other stuff
Tom Nordstrønen and Kjetil Fossum presented their solutions for ground handling and helicopter transportation (get in touch with them, those are awesome Domino based solutions) and Christoph Adler presented Marvel Client to show how much you can speed up your Notes client and Nomad by using their client for upgrades. Heiko Voigt from OpenNTF talked about the state of Domino development these days, Tobias Fonsmark from Semaphor talked about security on the Domino platform and Uffe Sørensen from HCL talked about the different licensing models.
We also mingled, of course, and were treated to a magnificent lunch from a one star Michelin restaurant. At the end of the day we mingled in the bar, before I had to catch my train.
Thank you to Arne, Wannes, Ulf Stider and Tobias Fonmark for organising this event and thank you to all of you who came. Wannes was nice enough to mention me as the previous runner of the user group and I’m happy to see someone have taken up the mantle after I ran out of steam.
Photos
Here is my photo album from the event:
