If you viewed my previous post, I asked HCL leadership the question: “Will you skip V13.0?” at the HCL Factory Tour. The conversation quickly went down a rabbit hole and I never got a clear answer. But the answer is quietly revealed on this website listing the fixes. You will notice there are already entries posted for V14.0.

While I’m here, I was looking at the historical data to see any trends or other noteworthy facts. HCL purged the data before 9.0.1 FP7, but I happen to have the original Notes database taken from when we could use Lotus Notes to access the Notes.net website and from that view you can see the following data going back to version 7 and earlier:

There is also a view of the number of fixes for each release and it becomes evident the number of fixes per year has dramatically increased since HCL took over. As I look back at the history, it also tells the approximate release dates for major releases. Can you tell where HCL Software took over?

In the beginning, Lotus was in control and putting out a major release about every 3 years. IBM maintained this pace until 8.0 was released in 2007. After that, IBM all but shut down feature development, taking nearly 11 years to produce the next two releases before development was taken over by HCL. With HCL, the development team was let loose and the results have been a new major release in a bit over once per year. Major versions are where the new features are introduced. What I find most impressive is that HCL also had to deal with the transition of taking over the business in those first 2 years and then COVID hit in January of 2020, right after the release of 11.0. The software development aspects have clearly improved with the transition to HCL. It looks like there will be no V13, but I expect we will see V14.0 sometime in 2023.

Coming soon, I will address Question #2 from Ask HCL Anything session: Why doesn’t HCL host a centralized location for this community to congregate and collaborate, using HCL software to drive it?