HCL Factory Tour 3 Review
I recently got the opportunity to visit HCL on their Factory Tour 3. It was a wonderful three days, and I learned a lot. I plan to get the presentation so that I can share specifics.
What made this factory tour extremely special? The first is that it was the first presentation, not under IBM’s control. Moreover, it was the first factory tour in the United States. The previous factory tours were held in Germany and Milan.
HCL purchased all the collaboration software from IBM, but they did not buy the structural software from IBM. Items such as WebSphere and DB2. These are still IBM products. HCL’s plan is not to abandon what’s already in place but to expand their ability to work with other Web servers and other databases with their product structure. They’re also planning for this software to use modern tools in the IT world. We saw several examples of software such as Domino, Connections, and Portal running environments such as Docker. While I don’t believe people who’ve never installed the software can truly understand the impact of this but the last time I installed Portal, it took a week to install. In the demo, they were able to set up the software, connected to the Docker, and once that connection was made startup four machines in five minutes.
I’m looking forward to these features being released.
The future of Domino is looking extremely exciting. Recently HCL released a client for the iPad. This is really a big point for the Notes and Domino users and developers. HCL provided demos of additional platforms for the Notes client. This future includes the iPhone, the android tablet, and an Android phone. These features will allow developers to write portable applications without knowing portable application technology, just the knowledge of formula and LotusScript.
One Domino slide showed the future of Domino. Currently, version 10 has been released, and the slide mapped out up through version 17 (and beyond.) I believe that HCL was looking at the product not only what they can short term but also things they can do in the long term.
Email is turned into a commodity and can be gotten from several resources. HCL is not abandoning mail because mail is too much component of the workflow. I believe HCL is taking Notes and Domino back to its roots. Notes and Domino was an application development environment with email being one of its applications. Utilizing a concept call Low-Code, users and developers will be able to make applications. The API is going through an improvement process along with the clients. One of their goals is to make Notes and Domino run on a variety of systems. One demo shows Domino running on a Raspberry Pi. A long-term future will include the embedded the Notes client in the browser so then its rollout would be as simple as changing the URL.
Another program that HCL is launching the client advocacy group. While companies like mine always support the Notes and Domino community, this advocacy group will be a direct line between companies and HCL.
I haven’t been this excited about the future of Notes and Domino since IBM bought the product and rolled out their first release. I think HCL has the fire in their belly that will take Notes and Domino far.
