Friday, November 3, 2017

Domino X and Beyond, What Does this Mean?

On October 25, 2017, IBM announced their strategic partnership with HCL with Domino, Sametime, Traveler, Verse and other products. As many have blogged and tweeted, IBM is turning over the development of these products for the forseeable future to HCL. Also, Ed Brill announced that IBM will be releasing Domino X in 2018 and #Domino2025 Jam to help determine the future of the Domino technology. I am not going to dwell on the details. You can find it yourself.  I am going to discuss what this means for Phora Group and myself.

There are many naysayers who have stated that this announcement is too late. I would say it is NEVER too late.

So what does this announcement mean for Phora Group and myself. Am I super excited, NO.  Am I happy, YES. Was the moving of development to HCL surprising, NO. And, it will not surprise me if the relationship with HCL go beyond just development, think Lenovo. We have been partners with IBM/Lotus for a very long time, and know that things just does not move fast at IBM. With Domino development moving to HCL, hopefully will move faster. However, it is really not about the technology but about the marketing and the application of the technology and this is where IBM's competitor have excelled at. With movement to hosting and the cloud, all users see is the application that they are using. Users does not know anything about the technology nor they care. We are in the world where someone throws up a cool application in the cloud, everyone starts using it and assumed it is trust worthy with their information being safe without any second thoughts until a breach. Users see marketing. So it is all about marketing and the applications that are available on the platform that will drive the future of Domino. No longer can you stay in a Business to Business mode. Regardless of what you are doing you are in the Business to Consumer mode.

Many people talk about Domino being a legacy technology. If that was the case, why are so many companies trying to duplicate its architecture including MongoDB, Couchbase, and SharePoint.  Some say that Domino do not use "modern techniques.  Well that depends on the development approach and techniques. Yes, there are features that I would like to see built into Domino. However, the flexibility of Domino allows you to use modern techniques not just for the front-end but the back-end. If you push old techniques as the way to do things, you get applications that are not modern. In our iPhora products, we have a modern JavaScript MVC front-end with a modern secure JSON-based datastore and architecture. And in our opinion of course being biased, superior to other solutions out there. It is fast and scalable. It allows us to integrate with other best of breed enterprise solutions. I will talk about that in part 2 is my current blog series next week.

Here is my technology wish list for the future of Domino:

  • 2-factor authentication, a must have.
  • Create Node C++ add-on integration into the Domino core C API.
  • Strip the Notes client down to the C API core (Notes Core) and integrate Node C++ API to allow it to connect to Electron and others front end tools.
  • Make sure the Notes Core runs on Linux.
  • Make the existing Notes Mail client and Notes application client add-ons to the Notes Core, this allows existing Notes Mail and application to continue working
  • No matter what, keep replication as part of the Notes Core, this is one of the most powerful features of Notes and Domino
  • Create a Verse add-on to the Notes Core so that we have true offline capabilities with Verse
  • Get rid of Eclipse and do not make it an option.
  • Strip Domino to the core components and let developers determine what components they want to use (Domino Core).
  • Make Java an optional add-on to the Domino Core so when new versions of Java comes along it is not a major operation to upgrade it and if you do not want Java, you do not have to install it.
  • Keep LotusScript, it has better security and control along with scheduled agents.
  • Remove Websphere from Sametime and bring it back to a Domino/Node solution.
  • Create a Domino Designer as an add-on to other development tools like Microsoft Visual Studio
  • Get rid of sorted views (it slows things down and not needed)

I figure that I will be working with Domino even when I am in my 70s.  It is the most unappreciated technology that I know of.  It is not the cool kid on the block, but it is a technology that I know is secure, scalable, flexible and reliable and yes it is modern.  It just need more love.

With this announcement, we can say we have NO plans to migrate off the Domino technology.


6 comments:

Nicki said...

"2-factor authentication" -- OMG YES, I cannot stress this one enough!!!!

"Get rid of Eclipse and do not make it an option." -- YAAAAASSSSSSSSS!!!

"Make Java an optional add-on" - OMG YESSSSS!

"Remove Websphere from Sametime and bring it back to a Domino/Node solution." -- I only know Sametime with WebSphere at the core, but would LOVE to see it as a Domino-based application!

"Get rid of sorted views (it slows things down and not needed)" -- This would make my users cry. Seriously, I'm talking ripping of robes, wailing, and gnashing of teeth of Biblical proportions. (though the evil admin in me loves this idea ;))

Paul S Withers said...

With regard to two-factor authentication, I've already built that for a customer using Google Authenticator (that can also use desktop solutions like Authy) and have approval to open source. I need to progress. One aspect that is slightly problematic is that post-authentication code on the server needs to know whether it's a trusted device or not, so in the implementation used the login page is an XPage. If this is of interest, I probably need to push up the priority (I have a lot of open source Watson work in the pipeline).

Nicki said...

Paul, I would love to see that! :D

Unknown said...

Thanks a lot for your post, what do you think about the development of IBM Verse cloud - Ibm Connections cloud...are there different software teams ?

Unknown said...

What do you think about the future of IBM Verse cloud and Connections cloud ? are they separated Ibm Developers teams ?

Domino Interface said...

Alessandro,

That is a good question. I believe the VOP will be HCL developers.

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