IBM Domino makes an impression at IBM think in Las Vegas

I’m just back from a whirlwind week in Las Vegas at the IBM think show. This was the biggest IBM show I’ve ever attended and at times it was literally a sea of humanity struggling with basic navigation.

While there were sessions on literally all things IBM I focused my time and energy on the ICS (IBM collaboration solutions) space by attending as many IBM Domino sessions at I could and by presenting a session on identifying internal champions to help drive adoption of IBM Connections.  There was also a cool presentation by the astronaut who did the space walk to fix the Hubble telescope.

The interest in IBM Domino was surprisingly strong given the diversity http://www.servervitalsigns.com/ibm-domino-makes…-think-las-vegas/of topics covered by the show.  Most of (many) sessions were full beyond capacity even in very large theater style venues.  There was a lot of exciting news in the Domino space given IBM’s recent commitment to revitalize and modernize the platform with features such as a dramatically increased NSF size (from 64 GB to 256 GB)  to make the product more bulletproof, easier to integrate with other systems, and more pleasing to work with from the perspective of the end user.   The specific goals of Domino 10 are detailed below and sourced from  https://www.ibm.com/blogs/collaboration-solutions/2018/03/14/domino-webcast-synopsis/ but what was particularly exciting was the prospect of  a native iOS client which was not only demoed on stage but devices were passed around the crowd to let us get close and personal.  The picture of the iPad is one I took and it shows iOS running a “traditional” Notes application faithfully without any modifications.

Rumor has it that Notes for iOS has been available internally at IBM for some time but now with the renewed commitment following the IBM/HCL deal the decision has been made to officially support it.  It is a port of the Mac client code with which it shared the majority of its code.   The reason for holding it back until now is the incredible amount of testing required before a new platform can be certified.  That’s understandable.

Domino V10 Portfolio Themes

Based on the overwhelming feedback from our clients, IBM Champions, Business Partners, this is what we are going to do in Domino V10 – that’s Notes V10, Verse on Premises V10, ST Chat V10 and Domino V10. Here are the three themes for Domino V10 (that we are sharing today):

First, Total Cost of Ownership – extend the strength of the platform, so for V10 we are going to focus on:

1) Making Domino more Bullet Proof

• New – Automate NSF/database repair – can be used to easily add new cluster members, add new databases, recovery from media failure or any other loss of content – all automatically.
• New – Replica sync-up – provides tooling to reconcile any differences between database replicas automatically and without disrupting on-going usage and replication.
• Remove the 64GB limit on NSFs and remove folder limits – folders will be able to hold millions of documents and NSF can be 256GB in size.
• New – Full text auto-update on search and resilience – auto/scheduled rebuild, crash prevention… Set of different things: (1) auto-updating will insure that all searches return all content, (2) Automatic FT rebuilds will be triggered if Domino detects any integrity issue with an index. (3) Periodic, scheduled FT rebuilds will be made easier in Domino tools and encouraged to help improve performance and stability.
• New – Docker Enterprise Edition images.

2) Make Domino easier to integrate within an enterprise IT landscape.

• Active Directory integrations made simple – will make easier to configure Domino and Active Directory integration, and ensure that the configuration continues to work well.
• ID/Vault management improvements – will improve ID file synchronizing with ID vaults and provide improved and automatic tools for ID vault maintenance.
• SAML IDP upgrades (inc. ADFS 4.0.) for SSO – will make configuration with SAML IDPs simpler and less error prone and will support current versions of popular IDPs.

Second, Experience – deliver a world-class mail and apps experience – desktop and mobile mail and chat, plus apps on mobile.

Based on the overwhelming feedback, the focus for the V10 and beyond for Mail (Notes and Verse, Verse Mobile, Outlook integration) and Sametime Chat experience is targeted at consumability, performance and functionality.

• Notes V10 – will be available on both Apple Mac and Windows with the same code stream. It will contain an auto update capability to improve Notes deployments for large organizations, plus an XULRunner upgrade to TLS 1.2 to keep mail/apps secure.
• Verse on Premises (VOP) V10 – will continue to improve this unique browser-based, mail experience.
• Verse Mobile and Traveler – these will continue on their agile iteration schedule.
• Sametime V10 Chat – is getting multi-client chat, mobile chat and file transfer added to the Sametime Limited Use License. You will be able to continue the conversation from your desktop to the road on your mobile device. Adding multi-device chat is entirely complementary to our cloud-based strategy and investment in Watson Workspace.

Third, Application Development – we want Domino to embrace the JavaScript, open source standards and communities as a full stack web platform.

We know Domino has always been and continues to be a “Swiss Army Knife” for app dev. Here are the “swim lanes” or ways we are focusing today for making it even better:

• Extend – continue to invest in the stability of the Designer and Xpages (e.g., Bootstrap 4 support), ICAA – will get an update to improve its deployability, look and feel, and authentication. IEI and SAP Connector 64bit – will be updated.
• Unleash – something we are saving to talk about at IBM Think. Hint – think Domino Apps anywhere.
• Enhance – it’s about solutions such as “TeamworkR” from Team Technology that makes modernizing the “look and feel” of Domino apps quick and easy for the desktop or mobile device. Plus, it keeps people on the platform.
• Evolve – it’s about bringing open industry standard tools, skills and developers to the platform.

Based on overwhelming feedback, we are adding Node.js to the Domino platform. Node.js is one of the leading open source frameworks and runtime environments for JavaScript applications. Node.js helps developers to make web applications more responsive by writing both client-side and server-side code in JavaScript and making them scale.

From a Domino perspective, this means that Node.js will become part of Domino’s evolving full stack development environment. There are a lot of opportunities for us to closely intertwine Domino and Node.js, plus, leverage JavaScript throughout the Domino platform. For V10, we are talking about step one:

• Node.js – is going to be part of the core Domino platform, not a sidecar implementation.
• You will be able to use the NPM to add any JavaScript packages.
• There are thousands of open source libraries and communities you will be able to leverage immediately.
• The ability to call existing Domino server-side activities/actions from JavaScript as well the ability to read/write data from any NSF.

The benefit of Node.js to the Domino community is that it opens up new opportunities to solve collaborative-intensive business problems in innovative ways. Furthermore, it helps to future proof Domino apps by bringing together industry standard technologies, abundant skills and a proven, business rich application platform.