Engage 2024

As I type, here in sunny old England (!), the opening general session of Engage 2024 is almost upon us. As always, Engage boasts an impressive range of sessions and speakers. LDC Via is in attendance (well, three quarters of us) and we’d be delighted to meet up and chat with any fellow attendees: hopefully we will see some of you over the next couple of days.

Incidentally, this conference is number fifteen, and it’s Theo’s last as organiser. We wish him well, and can’t thank him enough for all that he’s done over the years: we hope you enjoy your wee gift Theo!

2024!

The Concert (1623) by Gerard van Honthorst, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. online collection (public domain).

Oh my, it’s 2024 already. So, erm, happy new year? I think we can still say that despite it being the 11th…

Life proceeds apace, busy and eventful as ever, at LDC Towers. Yet again we find ourselves apologising for the radio silence on this site: we are terrible bloggers, no question (well, apart from the Wookiee).

As the year rolls over – LDC Via turns ten in 2024! – we find ourselves embroiled in the technology behind supply chains, fuel pricing, insurance, financial services, insolvency practitioners, amongst other things. Languages and platforms proliferate: Salesforce, Google, AWS, Azure, MongoDB, vector databases, SQL databases, node, Javascript, Lotusscript (LOL), and much, much more. Some of us even do management stuff (again, looking at the Wookiee).

It’s never dull eh. We wish you, and your loved ones, a happy, healthy and stress-free 2024: make that extra day count, and we will see you at Engage!

Engage.ug 2023 - The show does go on

Our very own Julian Woodward went to Engage.ug, and writes…

My previous trip to Benelux was to Engage in Arnhem in March 2020, just as the pandemic was getting going properly. So it was a delight to be back at Engage, in Amsterdam this time, after a three-year gap and having missed 2022. There were 300 attendees, including about 100 customer organisations.

Some things about Engage haven’t changed. Theo is still a superstar; the community is still awesome; the venue was, as always, splendid and unique; the catering was faultless; the vendors were numerous and enthusiastic; and the session content was varied and informative. What has changed is that the negativity of the dark years, which was already diminishing in 2020, has been entirely dispelled, not least by HCL’s drive and vision for progressing the product portfolio. The absolute underpinning of this portfolio is, as it always has been, Domino. There they continue to press onwards, with a major-release-per-year strategy that ensures that the former neglect can very much be consigned to history: HCL will “repair some of the damage of the past” and “remove business debt”. Both Verse and Nomad will become first-class citizens in the Domino world in the next release (v14 - they’re skipping 13 in order to not scare the superstitious) at the end of 2023, and will no longer require a separate installation step. There’s a lot of focus on Nomad, and it was good to see our friends at The Turtle Partnership getting opening-session coverage for the Nomad iOS work they’ve done with MacLellan. Nomad marches on, and there’s even a promise to start bringing Designer features into Nomad Web in v14. There was a very useful session on some of the technical underpinnings of Nomad - one of the highlights of the learning for me.

Another focus is licensing, both in terms of moving customers to simpler CCB (per user) licences and in terms of ‘Restarting’ dormant customers and getting them to move up to current versions. With the new release strategy being more aggressive, so is the end-of-life strategy: versions 9 and 10 will be end-of-life in June 2024, and version 11 won’t be very far behind.

As well as the core products, there was a lot of talk and content about some of the newer products and architectural components. Here we have a slightly IBMesque word soup of product and feature names: HCL Leap, HCL Volt MX, HCL Volt MX Go, HCL Foundry, HCL SafeLinx, VoltScript, Volt Formula, ….. While it’s possible to cut a path through this forest without too much effort, nonetheless it could do with some simplification. If Volt MX Go is such a core focus - as it does seem to be - why on earth does it need a three-part name? All of these are worth keeping an eye on, definitely, and the technical work that’s gone into Volt is genuinely impressive, but a little more clarity would help. Hopefully that will come as these products mature and find their niche in the HCL customer and partner worlds.

All in all, Engage was everything I hoped. A really positive story from HCL, lots of energy from them and in the community, some great learning, and a chance to catch up with old friends and make new ones.

On a sad note, Theo announced that 2024 will be the final Engage to be organised by himself and Hilde. I wouldn’t miss it for the world - see you in Antwerp - and I’m sure he will work hard to make sure that there is a noble successor for his splendid and unique legacy.

Twenty years of OpenNTF

OpenNTF is twenty years old today, can you believe that? For the die-hard Domino fans out there, you may well have seen an excellent video tribute to OpenNTF, which is really well put-together – hopefully it will go public at some point.

We were especially moved at the hat-tip to NTF himself at the very beginning.

OpenNTF was a huge catalyst for change and positivity within the IBM Lotus world back in the day. In addition to its fantastic templates and code, from which we all benefitted hugely, OpenNTF helped build lasting business relationships and deep friendships. We at LDC Via consider ourselves immensely fortunate to have been involved with this most excellent community.

Thank you Bruce and Nathan.

The Social Dilemma

We interrupt the silence on this blog (oops) to let you know that The Social Dilemma is available for free on Youtube until the end of this month. It’s well worth a watch.

Everyone on social media deserves to know how it works.

Never before have a handful of tech designers had such control over the way billions of us think, act, and live our lives.

Learn how the system works. Watch and share The Social Dilemma with people you care about.

View here.