Are You Ready? System Requirements #Perfect10

In this 4th webcast in my #Perfect10 series I discuss system requirements for v10 of Domino, Sametime and Traveler.  Yes I know we don’t know those yet and we don’t even have the beta but we do know some things that are coming and more importantly this is something you should do before any major upgrade regardless.  If we want an upgrade to be successful we don’t want it dragged down by old or outdated architecture and operating systems.

It runs a little bit longer than I like at 19 minutes I had a lot of information to cram in. I’m sure you can speed me up to 1.5x if you want to save a few minutes 🙂 As always if you have any feedback or would like me to do a webcast on a specific aspect please let me know.

What is NoSQL?

By Tim Davis - Director of Development.

I have been working with the MEAN/MERN stacks for a few years and with Domino 10 looking to introduce Node.js support, Domino itself is following me into the ‘World of Node’. This world is the full-stack web developer world of MEAN, MERN, and all things javascript, and in this world NoSQL is king.

The MEAN/MERN development stacks have been around for a while. They stand for MongoDb, Express, Angular/React, and Node. (The other main web development stack is LAMP which is Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python).

The reason the MEAN/MERN stacks have become so popular is because they are all based on the same language, i.e. javascript, and they all use JSON to hold data and pass it between each layer. It’s JSON all the way down.

You may already be using Angular or React as a front end in your Domino web applications. With the introduction of Node into the Domino ecosystem, this becomes even more powerful. Domino can become the NoSQL database layer of a full javascript stack (e.g. DEAN or NERD) and, most importantly in my view, Domino becomes a direct competitor to the existing NoSQL data stores such as Mongo and Couch which are so popular with web developers and CIOs.

So what exactly is NoSQL?

As you can tell by the name, it is not SQL. SQL datastores are traditional relational databases and are made up of tables of data which are indexed and can be queried using the SQL syntax. Examples are DB2, Oracle, and MySQL. The tables are made up of rows with fixed columns and all records in a table hold the same fields.

NoSQL data is not held in tables. It is held in individual documents which can each hold any number of different fields of different sizes. You can query these documents to produce collections of documents which you can then work with.

Does this sound familiar? Yes, this is exactly how Domino works! Domino was NoSQL before NoSQL.

The main advantage of NoSQL over SQL in app development is that it allows for more flexibility in data structures, either as requirements evolve or as your project scales. It also allows for something called denormalization, which is where you hold common data in each document rather than doing SQL joins between different tables, and this can make for very efficient queries. Again, this is how Domino has always worked. Notes views are essentially NoSQL queries.

In addition to all this, when NoSQL is used in a javascript development stack the use of JSON as the data format means that the data does not need to be reformatted as it passes up and down the stack, with less chance of errors occurring.

Now obviously the note items inside Domino documents aren’t held as JSON, and this would be a issue when looking to integrate Domino into a javascript stack, but the Node server solution being introduced in Domino 10 solves this problem.

The Node server in Domino 10 comes with a ‘connector’ to do the work of talking to Domino. It is based on Loopback and gRPC (both IBM/HCL initiatives) and promises to be very fast. Having this connector built-in means that you as the developer do not need to worry about how to get data out of Domino. HCL have done that job for you. All you have to worry about is what to do with it once you have it, e.g. send it out as a response from an API, show it in Angular or React, or whatever.

This is all very exciting as a developer, especially one like me who has worked with javascript stacks for a while, but as I mentioned earlier the power of this solution is that it moves Domino into a position to directly compete with other NoSQL databases in IT strategies.

In my next blog I will talk about the advantages that Domino brings to the NoSQL table and why I believe it is the best NoSQL solution for full-stack javascript development.

Engage Week & Lots of News

This week was the Engage conference held in Rotterdam - the largest and (IMO) best event Theo Heselmans has given us yet.  Rotterdam is a lovely city and the water taxi that took us from the restaurant back to the boat last night turned a 5 minute ride into a James Bond chase sequence - at several points he took corners by tilting the boat almost entirely on its side (there goes Tim!) and then onto the other side (bye Mike!) before pulling a handrake turn and reversing up to the dock - worth every cent of four and a half Euro.   I don’t usually find time to attend sessions beyond the keynotes because I get caught up presenting and doing other things (I find it hard to think what right now but let’s group it under “meeting people”) but this week I was rushing from presentation to round table to meetup so here’s a summary of my highlights, kept as short as I can so you aren’t tempted to tl:dr

HCL brought the energy, the enthusiasm and a huge team of people showing how far they have taken Domino, Notes, Traveler, Sametime , Verse on Premises etc.  IBM had energy too but their focus was Connections/Workspace and although it continues to develop, we in the ICS community have been starved for progress on the other products.  HCL together with IBM hosted several roundtables on Domino, Application Development, Notes Client, Verse on Premises etc where we got to ask for or complain about what we wanted or felt was missing and answer questions about design priorities.  I won’t go through all of that other than to apologise to everyone else in the Domino/Sametime roundtable who didn’t get a word in once I started.

From that Domino round table we heard about a couple of much needed and unexpected features coming in v10 (both of which I think are so new they haven’t yet been named) around the area of TCO. One is what I’d call a sync feature for Domino where you can tell a server to keep specific folders in sync with other servers in its cluster. Those folders could contain NSFs but also NLOs (DAOS files), HTML files or really anything else.  The server will create the missing files and it doesn’t use replication to do that.  Even better, if the server detects a NSF file corruption it is capable of removing its own instance of the file and pulling a new one from a cluster mate - all without any admin intervention.  Another great tool will be the idea of shared encryption keys for NLO files so that Server B will be able to copy even encrypted NLO files from Server A by decrypting and then re-encrypting them.  Management and maintenance of NLOs and the DAOS catalog was high on my list of enhancement requests.

From the Application round table we heard about how the integration with Node and Domino will work,  there will be a npm install - DominoDB that will allow Node developers to access Domino data via the Node front end. Queries to Domino from the Node server will be using high performance gRPC (remote procedure calls)  - in the same way Notes and Domino use NRPC for proprietary access. The gRPC access used by Node for Domino will eventually be open source.  The front end of the Node server will be surfaced using the Loopback API gateway.

Essentially what this means is that any developer who can program using Node will be able to use their existing skills against Domino NSFs.  That Domino systems will, in one step, become accessible to a much wider group of developers and systems is the main application development goal.

Domino statistics and reporting can be uploaded into and analysed from within the New Relic platform.  If you find this as interesting as I do then you too are clearly an administrator,

HCL Places.  So that was a surprise.  HCL demoed a working (but very basic) prototype of a new product they had been developing in secret (well no-one in the room knew of it).  A lightweight desktop collaboration client that runs against a Domino NSF. It can include mail,, sametime , video, mentions and Notes applications.  All on premises.  Here is a terrible image of the prototype which - yes I know is cluttered - but focus on the features not the look and you can see that HCL are trying to take Domino somewhere we’ve all known it could go but never had the chance.   The image was shared out by Jason Roy Gary who built and demonstrated the prototype and whose role at HCL is (I think)  Vice President Engineering and Innovation, Collaborative Workflow Platforms.

In a week full of good news the two best were that a beta program for v10 will start with phase 1 in June and phase 2 in July.  June will be a closed beta and July open.  If you want to register for the beta program when it is announced then sign up for the newsletter on the Destination Domino site here

Plus there was this .

I don’t want to minimise the contribution by IBM themselves at Engage, each of the roundtables included IBM’ers alongside HCL’ers and there was certainly plenty of activity around Connections and Workplace but right now, in this blog, I’m revelling in the fact that Domino is finally getting the attention it deserves.   Plus look at these great pens - they have little yellow highlighters in the top and when I asked IBM if I could buy some for customers they were happy to give me a “few”.

So - long story (it could have been sooo much longer) short.  A great week , I learnt a lot, my session on Docker was standing room only in boiling heat, I had the chance to talk to people I rarely get to talk to and Engage was in another great location.  I don’t know how Theo will match this next year but I look forward to finding out.  Plus I got chocolate as a speaker gift.

Now don’t go messing with my high.

V10 Roadmap: What’s new in Mail, Chat, and Verse on Premises?

Following on from our presentation at IBM Think, on Thursday May 24th I will be presenting a follow up webcast with Ram Krishnamurthy, Chief Architect, Notes, Designer and Xpages (HCL) and Andrew Manby, Director of Project Management (IBM).    On the webcast we will be showing the latest additions to Notes client mail, calendaring and Verse on Premises all of which comes from live code and will ship with v10 of each product later this year.

If you saw our presentation at Think there have been more additions and changes since then - the speed at which the products are being developed is something I haven’t seen before and there are some great new features and UI changes I think you will like.

We have a lot of content to cover in 45 minutes and Andrew will have some news you will want to hear too so go here to register for the webcast starting 10am EST, this Thursday the 24th of May.

If you want to stay up to date with all the changes happening to Domino, Sametime, Traveler, Verse and other products then keep an eye on the Destination Domino site where all the news and announcements appear first, and while you’re there why ot sign up for the newsletter.

As we all get ready for v10 of the products later this year I will be blogging more of my own preparation work on my blog at https://turtleblog.info and also populating a Youtube playlist called Perfect10 with a series of 10’ish minute videos to help you prepare.

Are You Ready: Domino #Perfect10

In today’s edition of my #Perfect10 webcast I discuss some steps in finding your Domino servers, reviewing their dependencies and auditing database access.   This is a 15 minute presentation which I’ve tried just as slides with my voice instead of video.

As always please let me know what you think and anything else you would find useful.

Next Up: Are you ready - Traveler, Sametime and Web Mail

 

Path To A Perfect 10 #perfect10

Here’s an intro to a new blog series I am starting to hopefully take us all through preparing for v10 of the ICS products due out later this year.  If you have suggestions for what you’d find useful outside of the things I mention in the video please let me know.  I’ll be using the hashtag #perfect10 for this which I’m sure isn’t used anywhere else and won’t lead to any confusion 🙂

Any feedback as to format is welcome.  Most blogs will have both slide content and video to match as I thought that the most engaging.  I am trying this as a YouTube channel.

 

The Champion & Confidence Dilemma

I wanted to share today something I’ve been dealing with for a few months and inspired by shares from others.  For those of you who don’t know the IBM Champion program, in short it was set up to acknowledge the work done by people who contribute to their Community outside of their regular jobs.

When I started as a business partner in the mid 90s the IBM community I was introduced to was full of people interested in IBM technology, wanting to learn and wanting to share what they knew with others for no reason other than they were excited about it and enjoyed seeing others doing the same.  In the past 20 years a lot of that has changed and I miss those days.  There are still lots of people who share and want to learn but the days of not wanting credit or taking a back seat are often (not always) gone.

I was encouraged and inspired for 20 years by people many of you will have heard of and many of you wouldn’t.  Without Andrew Pollack to tell me I was smart enough to learn this stuff and present, or Chris Miller offering to present wtih me or Rocky Oliver encouraging me to write, or Ben Langhinrichs asking the tough business questions about why I don’t charge more, or Carl Tyler giving me no leeway to make excuses, or Paul Mooney who was as enthusiastic about educating as I was and happy to work with me - without those people and many more in Penumbra and further afield I wouldn’t have chosen the path I did.  The path that led me to be an IBM Champion and 3 years ago one of the first (along with the amazing Theo Heselmans) IBM Lifetime Champions.

That should have been it right? Validation. The pinnacle of achievement.  Confirmation I was doing something right.

I hadn’t allowed for two things.  People’s misjudgement and their need to tear you down. Those two things in the past few months have brought me near to walking away.

I’ve learned to trust my judgement and my judgement says when people isolate me and ignore me it’s because they want to cut me out, and I assumed because they didn’t like me. I don’t consider myself that likeable so that’s a reasonable, although sad, explanation.  However I have realised in the past few weeks that apparently I am in some sort of competition that I was unaware of:  “Don’t let her get involved, she has enough credit”,  “Don’t get involved in ideas she has, she has enough credit”.  Little comments people have said in passing in my hearing serve to destroy my confidence daily. There have been many of these incidents, all small but incemental.

In a group discussion a few weeks ago I was trying to encourage someone I respect to put themselves forward to be a champion.  Another person in the group asked of the group, “Who thinks they deserve to be a champion?” and I, along with the other couple of champions there, put up my hand thinking we were supporting the discussion. This person said, “I don’t. I don’t think any of us do”.

I felt blindsided

I felt awful.

I still feel awful.

Maybe that person was right.  In which case the validation I had been accepting and working to deserve was just ego.  I didn’t think I had much ego but maybe I do. Maybe that’s what puts people off.

So this is to say to all of you out there:

  • Don’t project onto anyone a motive for their actions. Least of all your own.  Someone once said to me “well we all present for the applause don’t we”.  No. No we don’t.  Some of us do it to learn and to help others learn. That’s it.
  • Don’t project confidence where none exists. Don’t assume how you see someone is how they see themselves.
  • If you’re jealous, own that as your problem. I will put my hand up and admit to in the past being jealous of successful friends (Paul, Rob, Stuart) but that was my problem about where I felt I fell short and I truly hope they never felt the effects of it.
  • Don’t try and tear people down to make yourself feel better.

Your comments hurt. your actions or in-actions hurt. You cause hurt.

I wish it was still the mid 90s and we could still be that community that recognised the success of one is the success of all, but that was pre a lot of things and this is where we are now.

I’ll keep doing what I do because that’s the only way I know how to work and because presenting, blogging , sharing, learning, teaching make me happy.

 

Don’t Miss This Amazing Opportunity

In three weeks’ time I’m off to Rotterdam with over 400 other people to attend the Engage conference so in preparation I went through the mobile application (thank you Paul Harrison) and created my agenda.  Holy Heck .. I’m not sure how I’m going  to fit even the highlights in as well as my own sessions, seeing what the sponsors are doing and talking to friends (that bit may have to hold for the evening).

So at the bottom of this post are my DNM (do not miss) items.  Every one of them worth travelling to Rotterdam for.  The eagle eyed amongst you will notice I have already badly double booked myself but that I have also been smart enough to add my own sessions to my agenda so I don’t miss them.

I have three sessions, a technical one on Docker for Domino, a strategic one on creating your own personal brand and how to change that brand and one on managing the noise by filtering, limiting and controlling how and when people can reach you.

  • If you want to stay ahead of ICS product strategy and the fast moving developments happening this year.
  • If you want to start planning your v10 deployments and upgrades.
  • If you want to connect with IBM and HCL and feed back about a feature or functionality that’s important to you.
  • If you want to see presentations from leading independent IBM< Champions on administration, development, strategy and new technologies

Get registered and get yourself to Rotterdam