It’s great to see the buzz around Domino over the last two days, with the launch events at Frankfurt on October 9th and around the world October 10th. I was fortunate enough to be at the London event and it was a great turnout from customers. According to figures Andrew Manby gave about the Frankfurt livecast, 7000 people watched that (presumably also from the replays too). To put that in context, 5000 people watched the IBM mainframe anniversary. I remember the events around the launch of Verse a few years ago, at a time when IBM didn’t market products but really pushed Verse. This is bigger with a lot of marketing collateral around it. The resurgence of yellow, the drive from the Destination Domino microsite, the dominoes, the V10 launch logo, the cakes, the #dominoforever stickers, the t-shirts – let’s put this in some real context, there has been more marketing and more fresh and innovative marketing than I can remember seeing for Watson.
Over the last few days, from various feeds and on social media, I’ve seen a number of technotes and resources becoming visible. So I wanted to put together a list of things to be aware of and key resources available in case anyone’s missed them.
If you’re on 9.0.1 FP10, in the build-up to V10 you may have missed that IF4 was released over the weekend, details are on the page of IBM Interim Fixes and JVM Patches.
There are technotes for IBM Domino 10 and IBM Notes 10 part numbers. Linux will be important for developers who have signed up for the beta for the App Dev Pack, because it’s initially only available for Linux. Notes 10 for Mac is coming, so that’s not been accidentally missed. Mac users on Mojave will have seen that a new 9.0.1 client package was needed to support Mojave, so I guess that impacted availability of the team for putting whatever fixes were needed also in V10 – making the latest 9.0.1 version work was obviously a priority. Both these points were covered at ICON UK, and this is a good time to reiterate that now more than ever you need to keep on top of what’s announced at conferences, either by attending (it would have been nice to see even more people at ICON UK) or following on social media or blogs.
Talking of the App Dev Pack, if you’re interested in DQL – and every developer should be, in my opinion – there is a technote with a PDF about DQL and another technote and PDF about 10.0.0 restrictions. As you’ll see from that, 10.0.1 is already planned to roll out DQL wider. And let’s be clear here, this is a first pass at DQL. There are areas HCL are aware that it doesn’t cover yet, but that are planned and clearly needed. Outputting JSON for the documents to Node.js allows dynamic client-side sorting, but server-side sorting (ORDER_BY) is a definite requirement. DQL is a key step to building adoption from JavaScript developers – and almost certainly also for the low code development coming in V11. But it’s being built from the lowest layer of Domino up, so I’m fine that it’s not a first step and comfortable that HCL won’t get distracted and leave it in “non-production ready”. (I initially wrote “partial completion”, but as any developer knows, there are usually enhancements that can be made, so most developments are in a perpetual state of partial completion!)
Also published on Destination Domino is a PDF technical guide to Domino V10. It’s a brief overview of what’s available. For a deeper dive, for example into TCO benefits, look for presentations from the various conferences this year.
There’s also an excellent CIO’s guide to Domino PDF there. I’ll call this a developer resource as well, because if you want to get approval to upgrade Domino, this is a key resource to strengthen your case. Worth also adding in here, if CIOs feel Domino isn’t “enterprise” enough is the case study from Vossing. I’ve heard Bernd Gewehr talk about their use of Domino a few times this year and the size of infrastructure and content they put into Domino is definitely pushing boundaries. So check it out here.
If you are upgrading to V10 imminently and use Sametime Community Server, there is a technote to be aware of and a setting in Sametime that needs updating to allow V10 clients to connect. Also, there is a technote confirming removal of the NSD service. You may also notice that there is no Social Edition install. If you’ve used DOTS for scheduling processes in the past, you might want to redevelop those. The good news is there are a variety of options. Possibly the quickest is to use an HttpService, and there’s an example of that in ODA Starter Servlet. There are more details in the documentation on OpenNTF’s Confluence wiki. The added benefit here is that DOTS only exposes a subset of OSGi plugins. I think I found Apache Commons Lang was one that’s not available in DOTS but is in XPages. It certainly means you can re-use a lot of XPages libraries, so it’s easier to code and easier to deploy. Another option is Node-RED, and I created a blog series and video for that about a year ago. It’s what I also created for my IBM Think session with John Jardin.
There have also been a number of announcements about additional benefits of Domino V10. At Collabsphere Panagenda announced that Marvel Client Essentials would be bundled in Notes 10. Earlier in the year the entitlement to ApplicationInsights for reporting on your 50 most active applications was also extended for another year. And at the official launch IBM announced an entitlement from Team Technology to use TeamWorkr on one application for all users for free forever. See the livestream for more details.And our own RADAAR analysis tool has also been certified for Domino V10.
In addition, IBM have also announced two offers, an up to 50% reduction in reinstatement costs and up to 20% reduction in cost for additional licenses, both until the end of the year. See the Destination Domino site for more details.
There are also additional entitlements that come with Domino V10. Mobile access to Sametime is now an entitlement for Sametime Limited Use – previously you needed to have Sametime Standard. There will be more on Sametime next year and this was covered in a recent webcast.
IBM have also announced an early access program for IBM Domino Mobile Apps. Hopefully everyone has heard about HCL Nomad. IBM Domino Mobile Apps is the name for IBM’s release that every Notes Client user with a current maintenance subscription is entitled to. HCL Nomad will still be available direct from HCL for any customers out of maintenance, not wishing to reinstate, but wanting access to their Notes applications on iPad. Yes, standard Notes Client applications will work without changes – Apple don’t allow Java on iPad so that won’t work, there’s no embedded browser and obviously you can’t interact with Windows DLLs from the iPad client.
But as I’ve said before, a five-year-old client application will feel a lot older on iPad. Developers should strongly encourage users and businesses to spend a little of the millions saved, and give their applications a bit of a facelift ready for iPad. IBM Lifetime Champion Theo Heselmans has shown the way with a revamp of his wine tasting app and generously made it available on OpenNTF. Theo will also be doing a webinar giving a deeper dive, so watch out for that being announced on Destination Domino.
There were also a host of other demos from Luis Guirigay in Frankfurt and others around the world. Unlike demos in Lotusphere OGS sessions, the source code for at least some of those demos will be made available, including the integrations with Watson Workspace, Microsoft Teams and Slack. I think I also saw mentioned that the easy integration of Domino applications in Office365 will become available in the core Domino product in the V10-timeframe. These are must-have resources for developers, to increase integration of Domino with a wider IT infrastructure.
Of course there will also be more jams coming up, in preparation for Domino V11. Discussions and work has already started on some of the developments. But there will also be more 10.x releases before then.
There is a lot of information and news. And the prioritisations won’t satisfy everyone. But I for one am very grateful for the immense effort made by the developers, testers, beta testers, offering managers and marketing people. What we’ve got is infinitely more preferable to the lack of progress we had a few years ago.
very useful, thanks
Link to ODA Starter Servlet goes to https://openntf.org/main.nsf/project.xsp?r=project/OpenNTF%20Domino%20API%20Starter%20Servlet
which contains a link to https://wiki.openntf.org/display/ODA/ODA+Demo+Servlet
which is dead.
should be https://wiki.openntf.org/display/ODA/ODA+Starter+Servlet
Thanks, I noticed it wasn’t working a couple of weeks ago and couldn’t work out why. All fixed now.
Would you happen to know if there will be a local server option for developers to use? Like what they currently have for 9.0.1?