Yesterday Inhi Cho Suh announced the strategic partnership between IBM and HCL to move the Notes and Domino Family forward. In 2018 a brand new version, 10, will be released.
For lots of customers who have invested in Domino applications it is very good news. Less need to move away to other products.
IBM will be organising jams, to define the future of the product. It is a great opportunity to show interest in the product and what you think is most important in the product. Sign up know to keep informed.
My thoughts about the way forward
I am a developer and nowadays develop mostly outside the ICS space, I have some thoughts to get back.
Deprecate Lotusscript
Lotusscript is nice but will not move the product forward. Deprecate is, so the application is still backwards compatible, but stop investing time in a newer version. It makes the product not compatible with other products.
Cut the wire
As soon as possible, remove the relation between the Notes Client and the Domino Designer. This relationship slows down the big steps forward the Domino Designer needs.
No fat client
Who needs a fat client, in my opinion there is less need of a fat client, like the Notes Client. Most of customers can do their business with a web based solution. So give most love to the Domino Designer and Admin and NOT the Notes Client. Migrate it your self of use the Aveedo or Darwino
Make the Designer flexible
Make the the Domino Designer available as flexible as possible. For example available as a Eclipse or IntelliJ plugin. And of course remove the restriction to run the Domino Designer needs Windows.
So lots of things to improve, hope to see you at the jam, in person or virtual.
Lets jam and make the future bright again.
There probably is a reason why you “nowadays develop mostly outside the ICS space”. I am yet to meet a single customer who is still using Notes and Domino because it is such a compelling web app platform. Many depend on the legacy AND the fat client.
Lotusscript and the fat client won’t bring you new customers but it ensures that your existing ones stay on board (many have left anyway). The Outlook Rich Client is a prove that the death of the fat client is greatly exaggerated (the death of bad fat clients is not).
Lotusscript has not been significantly enhanced for 10 years and this has not helped the platform. Removing the Lotus brand has not helped either.
Better products make better platforms not deprecation and removal. Or to be more specific if you remove you need to have something better and a good upgrade path. IBM XPages for example never delivered on that promise.
I know this sounds a bit like I would like to develop Lotusscript for the next 20 years in my beloved rich client but the truth is that I started using other technologies like Play and Ninja Framework, Grails and little Spring (Boot) years ago embracing web technologies like Bootstrap, jQuery or AngularJS.
I still do Notes and Domino because in some way it still works for some customers. Aveedo or Darwino are both good products but in some way it is a problem if you have to buy additional third party software to fix something that is broken. And for me at least Darwino is something that I would probably use if I want to move away.
thanks for your insight, Henning.
Or is this a bit of clever news management by IBM? Take a negative i.e. outsourcing of Notes/Domino and wrap it up in the perceived good news of “Version 10”.
The outsourcing concerns me. It shows they no longer consider Domino/Notes as important. The version number is just a number, I’m more interested in what improvements we get not whether it’s called FP11 or version 10.
“Who needs a fat client” – couldn’t disagree more. The vast majority of my application development is for the Notes client using LotusScript. It’s still way faster than developing in xpages and we need local replicas for the many places our employees work where there is no internet connection. I’m hoping it’s the turn of the classic Notes developer to get some improvements.
It also concern me, especially for the people who still rely on Domino as main source of income. About the fat client. I haven’t touched the Notes Client for ages and I don’t miss it. In my opinion the Notes Client is not the way forward for the product