Beyond 11

Monday, December 9, 2019 at 8:05 PM UTC

On December 4th HCL revealed V11 of Notes/Domino and Sametime as well as Connections 6.5 (already released) and other insights of the new products Nomad and Volt.

This event was announced months ago in a kind we last saw with release R5 and the "I AM" and "Super Human Software" effort decades ago. It had it's effect.

All was wrapped within the Factory Tour vol. 4 in Japan (Tokyo). I followed this over the day prior to the real major event that was supposed to be streamed live from the capital of Japan.

I was somewhat left disappointed.

As a frequent Twitter user I already saw photos from slides of the Factory Tour during the day that showed some cool stuff thanks to my Japanese friends who were there in person: Domino/Notes V11 of course which I already use in beta 2 on one of my remote machines with delight and Connections 6.5. I am and never was a user of the latter.

The "deep dive" didn't happen, instead you are pointed to a blog post: https://hclsw.info/tokyo

My personal highlight was HCL Domino Volt, a product which got it's name right on this event and formerly was known as "Domino Builder" or "HCL Leap on Domino". Both were just internal project names I heard before. I am lucky to use HCL Leap for quite a bit now to know it's strengths and weaknesses. When this will be available for Domino customers (with an additional license) this will bring the low-code topic at a next level to our beloved Domino platform. Closed beta will start in Q1/2020 and I hope to be on the list of testers.

I am a bit biased at this point as I am part of the development team around Aveedo, a low-to-pro-code platform that runs on Domino natively since 2013 and brings you in-browser development tools out of the box. We do not see Aveedo and Volt as competitors but as two solutions running side-by-side. There once may be synergies around both solutions regarding templates and ready-to-go applications for small and mid businesses.

One thing stroke me: the "live" presentation looked like a pre-recorded set of videos. I may be wrong but everything went "too smooth" for my personal taste. I respect the demos to be pre-recorded because I learned what can happen with live-demos in presentations the hard way, believe me.
For an event announced this "heavy" I expected something more "real" - do you know what I mean?

Anyway, it was all about the content, not the presentation. For that I want to thank Richard, Andrew, Francois, Danielle and all the presenters in the video snips for their effort to introduce us to the latest from HCL. You are doing a great job, especially the developers, who constantly ask for input on all channels. This is very much appreciated and keeps the ecosystem alive.

I think we never had this direct conversations and knowledge exchange during product development beyond conferences and face-to-face meetings ever since the old and wise guys directly talked to the dudes from Lotus. Happy 30th birthday by the way, you old stinky fart, Notes! I still love and hate you Smile







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