Engage 2022 Bruges - Tips To Delight Your Domino Admin

Below is a copy of my presentation from Engage “30 Tips To Delight Your Domino Admin”

This was my first presentation in over two years and Engage couldn’t have been a better choice. As always the event was packed with people and content as well as being hosted in beautiful Bruges. Thank you to Theo Heselmans and Hilde for all their hard work and pulling together the whole thing.

From day to day administration to advanced configuration from automated maintenance to running the best multi client mail server on the market, from advanced security to data access, prepare to be surprised and delighted as we cover as many top tips that we can fit into the time of this session.

All About That Volt (v11 launch)

We are still a few hours out from the v11 launch event for Domino and Sametime live from Tokyo (https://www.cwpcollaboration.com/blogs/join-us-for-a-live-broadcast-from-tokyo-december-4-our-global-product-launch) but there is already much talk about “Volt” a low code (maybe no code) development tool.

I found this great short demo video which shows what it is better than I can explain having not touched it myself. Very smart stuff that enables rapid simple application development that can work on mobile, be extended with more complex programming if required, and easily integrated with other systems such as sharepoint or salesforce.

Looking forward to hearing all the news in only 6 hours.

At Engage We Are Bringing You Domino, DQL and MOAR Domino

Engage - the largest collaboration user group in Europe takes place May 14th and 15th in Brussels.   It’s free, full of great content with speakers from customers to BPs to HCL and IBM.  There are even three workshops on May 13th, the day before everything kicks off that you can register for with HCL discussing a potential App Store, Panagenda showing you how to optimise your Notes clients and IBM with ISW conducting a workshop on your ideas for the future of Connections.

Between us Tim and I will be presenting four sessions including

Face/Off Domino vs Exchange On Premises (Weds @ 8am - I’ll make it worth your while getting up!) We will discuss how Exchange on premises and the various Outlook clients line up against Domino on premises and its clients.

Domino Server Health - Monitoring and Managing (Tuesday @ 1.30pm) How do you decide what to monitor on your servers and how to manage them and how good practice management tools such as statistics reporting, DDM, cluster symmetry, database repair and policy settings can make your work lighter and faster.

60 Admin Tips In 60 Minutes (Weds @ 9am - yes that’s two sessions one after the other in the same room - bring breakfast and coffee !) You know the drill, tips for Domino, Notes, Verse on Premises, Sametime, Traveler and more

In an introduction to DQL How to use the new Domino Query Language (Weds @ 11.30am) Tim will take you through the new Domino Query Language (DQL), how it works, and how to use it in LotusScript, in Java, and in the new domino-db Node.js module, providing code examples in all three languages.

We are also pleased to be sponsors of Engage this year for the first time and to add our support to the amazing efforts by Theo and Hilde.

Register for Engage and / or a workshop here

See the agenda here

Speaker

At Engage We Are Bringing You Domino, DQL and MOAR Domino

Engage - the largest collaboration user group in Europe takes place May 14th and 15th in Brussels.   It’s free, full of great content with speakers from customers to BPs to HCL and IBM.  There are even three workshops on May 13th, the day before everything kicks off that you can register for with HCL discussing a potential App Store, Panagenda showing you how to optimise your Notes clients and IBM with ISW conducting a workshop on your ideas for the future of Connections.

Between us Tim and I will be presenting four sessions including

Face/Off Domino vs Exchange On Premises (Weds @ 8am - I’ll make it worth your while getting up!) We will discuss how Exchange on premises and the various Outlook clients line up against Domino on premises and its clients.

Domino Server Health - Monitoring and Managing (Tuesday @ 1.30pm) How do you decide what to monitor on your servers and how to manage them and how good practice management tools such as statistics reporting, DDM, cluster symmetry, database repair and policy settings can make your work lighter and faster.

60 Admin Tips In 60 Minutes (Weds @ 9am - yes that’s two sessions one after the other in the same room - bring breakfast and coffee !) You know the drill, tips for Domino, Notes, Verse on Premises, Sametime, Traveler and more

In an introduction to DQL How to use the new Domino Query Language (Weds @ 11.30am) Tim will take you through the new Domino Query Language (DQL), how it works, and how to use it in LotusScript, in Java, and in the new domino-db Node.js module, providing code examples in all three languages.

We are also pleased to be sponsors of Engage this year for the first time and to add our support to the amazing efforts by Theo and Hilde.

Register for Engage and / or a workshop here

See the agenda here

Speaker

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.

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”.

IMG_0126

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.