One Platform to Work With Them All

HCL Digital Week started today, and we got a sneak preview of Domino V12. If there never was a time to migrate away from Domino, that time is now! Don’t believe us? Read on!

Barry Rosen (now sporting a Covid-19 goatie that demands respect) and Francois Nasser gave us a demo and a walk-through of what Domino V12 will deliver when it’s released in six months (by our calculations, that means May 2021, but that could change).

Domino

The first thing Barry did was to show us that he upgraded from IBM Domino V9.0.1 to HCL Domino V12 in less than five (5!) minutes. Yes, you read that right. With V12 upgrading the server is easy peasy. When you upgrade other application platforms you will face the at least one of following problems:

• Data migration to a new server
• You will have to test all applications to see that they still work
• Backwards compatibility
• Test that web applications still work with all the frameworks
• Migrating email to the upgraded platform

With Domino V12 you don’t have to think about stuff like that (you never really did with Domino as it’s big strength have been backwards compatibility). Also: Since the upgrade is done in a few minutes, you don’t have to worry about much downtime. Now, that is Return of Investment for you!

Another great thing is that V12 will finally have a lot of functions that we have wanted for a long time:

• You will no longer have to deal with .kyr files and lot of complex administration to upgrade web certificates because Let’s Encrypt will be included with V12, and the Domino server will actually automatically renew the certificates for you!
• From V11 you could create and administer Domino groups and users from Active Directory. From V12 you can also sync passwords! This means you will now need just one password for all users in Notes, Domino, web solutions, SharePoint, Office 365 and other systems like Sales Force. Turn on single signon and your users will have to write the password only once, or at least they will only have to remember one password
• “But isn’t that less secure,” we hear you shout. No, because Domino V12 comes with 2FA! Finally!
• The ID-file will still be there, but it will be much less cumbersome to deal with in V12 as the ID Vault can be automatically deployed
• Domino V12 will be able to run on any cloud provider
• A new backup API will make it possible for you to run backup of Domino v12 with any backup solution of your choice! 

Notes

Notes V12 will be the last time you have to worry about upgrading the Notes client. From now on you will be able to use Nomad Web inside your web browser to run any Notes application, as long as it doesn’t contain Eclipse based functionality. So after V12 you won’t have to do major upgrade projects to roll out updates of hundreds or thousands Notes clients. You just have to upgrade a simple web app.

This doesn’t mean that Notes V12 won’t have any changes or upgrades. The client will be even lighter, and they’ve added a new typeahead search functionality that will work very much like the search in Outlook (although in Notes’ case, you will hopefully actually find what you are searching for…)

Will this be the end of Notes? We don’t know, but since they are still investing in the client, we don’t think so. And even if the Designer and Administrator clients weren’t mentioned during the presentation, they will still be needed.

Domino Nomad Web

Nomad is the client that makes it possible for you to run Notes applications on your mobile devices without the need for any code changes.

Enter Domino Nomad Web, which is the successor to what IBM called the Notes Browser Plugin, and what has up until now been called HCL Application Client Access. It basically means you are running your Notes client in your web browser of choice.

We stated above that you can run your Notes applications on mobile devices without any code changes, and that is true. However, this is also the perfect opportunity for you to modernise the graphical user interface. HCL will even provide support to hide design elements from the Mobile client with new @-functions in formula and design choices inside the Designer client. Also: They will provide new and modernized icons, view list styling options, field types and more! They will also make a design handbook available. That’s awesome and will help you get started.

Here is an example of an old Notes application before and after such a quick update of the user interface:

 

Remember: You won’t need to re-write the application. Nor will you need data migration or changes to the code controlling the business logic in the background!

HCL Nomad Web will also include:

• Two factor authorisation
• Single signon
• No need for the user to have to type in anything other than their password (no server names!)
• Support for using Face ID or Touch ID to log on
• You can access Notes mail, but it will be the mail template looking like V7, because the modern Notes mail is based on Eclipse, which will not run inside Domino Nomad Web

Verse

There weren’t many news about Verse, the modern web mail interface for Notes mail. We already know that iNotes will not be a part of Domino V12, so from now on it will be Verse only. The only new things announced around Verse were a slight upgrade of the calendar user interface and that with Sametime V11.5, you will be able to schedule Sametime meetings from the Verse calendar.

A cool thing was that booking a Sametime meeting will generate a QR-code that you can send out with the meeting invitation. People can then scan it on their cell phone and be sent directly into the meeting.

Xpages

Domino V12 will of course support Xpages, but there’s nothing new on offer form HCL, apart frome one thing: Domino V12 will come with Bootstrap 4, so that you can finally bring your Xpages applications up to date on the UI side.

Microsoft Teams

Now, this was pretty cool! With Domino V12 you can add a Domino application directly into Teams in this way:

• Add a new application to a tab in a channel
• Choose the new app to be a web site
• Give the app a name
• Paste the URL leading to the Domino app in the URL field
• Voila

 

Sign up for Nomad Web Beta

 

So, what do you think of these news? Are you as excited as we are? Let us know in the comments!