Welcome Back DominoJam 2022!

If you'd told me back in 2018 that I'd be attending a Domino Jam in 2022, I wouldn't have believed you - and yet, that's exactly what happened. Even more incredibly, I left the jam feeling reinvigorated and excited for the future of this 30+ year old system.

I've talked before about how our departure from the platform was fueled by largely emotional reactions to the dated mail UI and a resistance to change for new users unused to anything but Microsoft Outlook. We picked the low hanging fruit (mail migration to outlook) and we also tried converting a more complex system.

See:

New Year, New Directions (January 2017)
Our Domino State of Play 2022 (February 2022)

Far from abandonment, our strategy for moving to Azure demonstrated the versatility, reliability, security and ROI of domino and resulted in recognition of its value as a platform and an abrupt U-turn in our strategy.

Fresh out of the Sydney Domino Jam, I want to talk about some of the revelations for the future of Domino and how they affect us (my organization) but will probably need to spread it over a few posts, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I want to reaffirm that HCL has done a fantastic job with Domino since they took it over. A far cry from IBMs meager efforts.

We got a look at the roadmap which includes feature enhancements for the next three years (one release per annum), plus support promises for much further into the future. This is on par with most other software developers now. It's clear that Domino is a very significant product in HCLs portfolio and that its future is secure.

The jam moved on from the roadmap to look at Domino's security strengths, the upcoming features and the philosophy behind HCLs Volt products.

HCL were very open to questions and were actively listening to their users - a quality that I haven't seen in a large developer for at least a decade.

They put up a list of questions and made sure that they answered them all. I asked about the licensing changes and got some great answers from their team. I'll share them in a future post.

There's a lot more to unpack but for now, even if you only have Domino on a dusty old box in the corner of your office, you owe it to yourself to check the list of jams and attend one if you can.

HCL are building some amazing domino apps suitable for everyone ranging from fans to customers who plan to leave the product -- that's right, even if you're trying to leave Domino, HCL has a great product for you that will let you leave at your own pace - or stay, if you change your mind.

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