On December 4, HCL unveiled V11 from Notes/Domino and Sametime as well as Connections 6.5 (previously released) and other news about the new Nomad and Volt products.
This event was announced months ago in a manner last seen with the R5 release and claims like “I AM” and “Super Human Software” decades ago. This had its impact.
Everything was packed as part of the Factory Tour Vol. 4 in Japan (Tokyo). We followed all this over the day before the actual event, which was to be broadcasted live from the Japanese capital.
HCL Master Oliver Busse describes his impression of the HCL Live Event:
At first I was a bit disappointed. As a Twitter user, I had already seen photos of slides from the Factory Tour all day long, which were published thanks to my Japanese friends who were there in person: Domino/Notes V11 of course, which I already use in Beta 2 on one of my remote computers and Connections 6.5.
The “Deep Dive” to all news did not take place, instead a link to a blog post was provided: https://hclsw.info/tokyo
My personal highlight was HCL Domino Volt, a product that got its name at this event and was formerly called “Domino Builder” or “HCL Leap on Domino”. Both were just internal project names I had heard before. I am lucky to have been able to test HCL Leap for quite some time now to learn about its strengths and weaknesses. When Volt is available to Domino customers (with an additional license), the low code theme will be taken to a new level on our beloved Domino platform. The closed beta will start in Q1/2020 and I hope to be on the list of testers.
I’m a bit biased at this point, as I’m part of the development team around Aveedo, a low-to-pro code platform that has been running natively on Domino since 2013, providing in-browser development tools out-of-the-box. We don’t see Aveedo and Volt as competitors, but as two solutions that can run side by side.
Something bothered me though: The “live” presentation looked like a pre-recorded set of videos. I may be wrong, but everything ran “too smooth” for my personal taste. I understand when demos are pre-recorded because I know from my own experience what can happen to live demos in presentations the hard way. But for a presentation that was announced so massively in advance, I was hoping for a bit more.
Anyway, it was about the content, not the presentation. For this I would like to thank Richard, Andrew, Francois, Danielle and all presenters of the video sequences for their efforts to introduce us to the latest from HCL. You are all doing a great job, especially the developers who are constantly asking for input on all channels. We all appreciate it very much and it keeps the ecosystem alive.
