As usual I attended Engage, and as usual it was a very good event.
It was the first one not organized by Theo Heselmans, but Kris and Tom did a great job. I believe Engage is in good hands for the future.
The location was nice, though not very eccentric like the ones Theo has used in the past, the New Babylon conference center; it had the advantage of being right in front of the Central Station, so getting there was a no-brainer, and the hotel I choose, like many others, was just around the corner, literally.
I went with my friend, co-speaker, and partner in crime Marianna Tomasatti, and also this year the start of the adventure was a bit uphill (though not serious like last year). As I said the conference center is named New Babylon, and the hotel is named Babylon; this has created a bit of confusion for me and Marianna. As soon as we stepped out of the train station, we saw the sign of the New Babylon and went straight there, convinced it was the hotel. We entered, it was 8.45 p.m., and it was deserted. The stairs for the reception were closed with a rope, no one was around…. While Marianna was deciding which couch she would sleep on, I called the hotel and told the receptionist that I had a reservation, but there was no one and the reception was closed. After listening patiently to me, he said “Sir, I believe you are at the New Babylon, but that is not us, we’re the Babylon. Exit, turn right at the corner and you will find us”.
I have been told by a couple of other attendees (no names) that they made the same mistake, so I am glad I am not the most stupid attendee 🙂
The sessions were good, as you can easily imagine the big focus was on DominoIQ, it seemed to me that every third word in the HCL sessions was DominoIQ, but I guess that’s normal, this is the big thing coming with Domino 14.5.
A big new that made all, and I mean all, the attendees happy was that HCL is going to make a completely new Notes client, they briefly showed a slide of the possible UI, a teaser to keep us waiting for it. If you see him at an event, ask Tim Clark when it will ship, I already did 😀
Another interesting topic has been the concept of Sovereign Cloud, i.e. have your servers in cloud, but located in a provider in Europe rather than leaving up to Google or Microsoft where to store your data and decide who can access. A better description of what HCL is doing can be found here
I had two sessions, the first one was the OpenNTF roundtable, where we officially announced the new community server domino.openntf.net, you can find the details on the openNTF website in this post
The second one, which I presented with Marianna, was on the customization of the Verse UI and extending Verse features using extensions. The slides are posted on the Engage web site, look for my session and you can download it from there. In the session I told that I would made available the applications.json file I used to make the customizations. I have uploaded it as a snippet in the OpenNTF web site here
I don’t want to make this post too long, so I will not go into the details of the file. Maybe I will do a blog post specifically for that, if someone is interested.
Kris and Tom have announced that Engage 2026 will take place in Belgium, but the location is undisclosed for now. I look forward to next year, Engage is not only good for learning new things, but mostly for meeting old friends from other countries, and make new ones.
This request came from a customer, and thinking about it is nothing strange.
Since you can have Sametime installed on Windows, can I install it on the same machine where I have already installed a Domino server ? For sure this will cause a performance problem, you have more stuff running on the same HW, but since nowadays hardware is pretty cheap having to add some more memory to a server is not a problem. The advantage, money-wise, is that you don’t have to install another server and pay another Windows server license (that was the origin of the request).
What is the problem ? By default both Domino and Sametime use port 443 for HTTPS.
If you can change the HTTPS port in Domino from 443 to something else, there is no problem, is the easiest way to use both Domino and ST on the same machine; but if, for whatever reason, you can’t do that, then the solution is to change the port used by Sametime.
This is not documented, but can be done.
Open the file C:\Sametime\traefik-windows-amd64\conf\traefik.yml and change the port there
I found that some little customizations can be made to the Sametime web chat client UI also for the server running on Windows. For the ST server running on Docker, customizations are documented, for the Windows based server not.
I changed the logo and the branding of the server
To change the logo go in the directory C:\Sametime\nginx-win-x64\html\images and replace banner-image.svg with a svg of your choice. I assume that the file name must remain the same, so I made a copy of the original and renamed my file to banner-image.svg
To change the text, it depends on the language. For example to change the Italian one, go into C:\Sametime\nginx-win-x64\html\chat-client\locales\it and edit the file general.json. Find the string “HCL Sametime”: “HCLSametime”, and replace with “HCL Sametime”: “RoB Sametime”,
Do the same for locales\en or whatever language you want.
The result is this, in the Firefox normal window (white) you can see the changed logo only, because the browser language is English. In the private window (black) you can see the changed logo and branding, because the browser language is Italian.
NOTE: These changes are not officially supported, I tried it and they work successfully in my environment.
I have again the honor and privilege of presenting at Engage. I will have two sessions, one individual and one as OpenNTF.
I will present my session together with my dear friend, and once again partner in crime, Marianna Tomasatti. Our session is about customizing the Verse UI
Ad11. Customize Verse without being a Developer – Wednesday, May 21: 13:30 – 14:15 With iNotes Web Access becoming not supported starting from V14.5 everyone will move to Verse, so it is likely that your customers will ask for some customizations. You can easily do that, even if you are not a developer but an admin like us. In this session we will show you a “quick and dirty” way to make some UI customizations to Verse without the need of involving a professional developer.
The second session, which is actually the first one chronologically, is an OpenNTF round table where we will introduce a new initiative we’re working on for the community
De06. OpenNTF.net – a new initiative for the Community – Tuesday, May 20 | 15:30 – 16:15 | 1.10 Come to this roundtable to discover what is the new initiative that OpenNTF has taken to further foster the collaboration in the community. What is it, what it can offer to you, what do you need to be part of it (hint, a Notes client)
The Sametime Chat server on Windows is pretty new, so is understandable that the documentation is not yet complete. The help center explains how to install it, but not how to change the default TLS certificates.
When you install Sametime on Windows, it will create its own TLS certificate, a self signed one generated by Traefik, which is one of the components Sametime uses under the hood.
To replace it and use your own real certificate, if you have one, go into the C:\Sametime\traefik-windows-amd64\conf\keys directory. Here you will find 2 files, cert.crt and cert.key. Those are the self created ones. Just replace them with your certificate and private key and that’s it. There are 2 possibilities, either you rename your crt and key files to cert.crt. and cert.key, or if you want to keep a different name, say company.crt and company.key, you can edit the file :\Sametime\traefik-windows-amd64\conf\dynamic.yml. At the end of the file there is this:
As you hopefully know, OpenNTF has launched a new initiative, the OpenMic with the Developers sessions. If you don’t know about this, you can read more here
We have created an email address, openmic@openntf.org, that you can use to send your questions in advance, so if you want to ask something on the topic discussed, you don’t have to wait for the session to go live. This means that even if you are not able to attend the session, you can watch the replay video later and get the answer.
If you are “senior” enough, like me, i.e. you were playing with a Notes server when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, you surely remember the annual Yellowverse gathering event, Lotusphere.
Great opportunity to meet distant friends, and to learn from excellent technical sessions; but one was for sure everyone’s favorite, the last one to close the show, “Ask the Developers”. If don’t know what I am talking about, it was a session where 15 / 20ish developers from the lab were on stage and everyone could ask any kind of technical question to them. There were Product Managers too, in case someone asked “Where is Domino Designer for my Mac?” (IYKYK); that is the kind of question that a developer can’t answer.
OpenNTF and HCL are bringing you back to the future 🙂 We will host each month a Open Mic session with HCL Developers, on different topics, where you can ask them your toughest questions. Please keep it as focused as you can on the specific topic, asking again when the Designer for Mac will ship would just be a waste of time…. 😉 . In order to avoid confusion, the session will be moderated, i.e. we will unmute a person at a time to allow him to ask the question. It will not be all the mics open all the time.
This is the announcement video
The first session will be on Thursday Jan 23rd at 11 AM EST, 5 PM for us in Central Europe, 4 PM for the Brits, who always like to be different 😛 , and the topic will be “Domino authentication protocols”, with Dave Kern (aka the Resident Paranoid) and other member from the security team.
Please head over regularly to OpenNTF blog main page where we will publish all the dates and topics for the Open Mic sessions, as we already do for our webinars
Is a nice way to end the year to receive this mail:
“Hi Roberto,
Congratulations!
You are receiving this email from us as you are being recognised as an HCL Ambassador for 2025. We think that’s super awesome!”
Is a honor and a privilege to be part of this group once more. In the Ambassador class there are people who are literally legends in the yellowverse and being in company of them is really a great accomplishment for me.
One of the very big news in Sametime 12.0.2 FP2 is the new Sametime Chat server (only chat, no meetings) for Windows.
I believe this is useful for the MS die-hard fans, or for those who don’t feel confident with Linux and containers. Though in my personal opinion the standard containerized version is a better choice.
Anyway, I installed it. The procedure is the same as for the old version: you have to install Mongo and create the sametime user and the databases. All this is detailed in the instructions here https://opensource.hcltechsw.com/sametime-doc/v1202/admin/t_configure_mongodb.html, though you have to be aware not to simply copy/paste the script from that page because it contains line breaks, copy it in a text file, make it a single line and then use this one. Then you have to modify the mongod.cfg file and enable replication and restart Mongo. Then the installation of the Sametime server is basically “next,next,…” in the various screens that show up. You have to give the server name, the mongodb connection string, select the LDAP server type and give its details. Nothing new, which is good for those familiar with the previous version setup.
All in all it takes less than 10 minutes if you don’t make any mistake. If you do, in the Sametime installation directory there’s a sub-directory named Trace, that contains the logs. Have a look there to find what’s wrong. The setup will create several services (sounds familiar ?) and the one you need to start to fire up and shut down Sametime is called “ST Community Launch”, which is the only one set to automatic start.
That’s it. Now even if you are not familiar with Linux, there’s no excuse not to have a Sametime Chat server running in your company 🙂
Today HCL releasead Sametime 12.0.2 FP2, so I immediately installed it on one of my test servers.
As I repeatedly said before, the upgrade can’t be much easier than this. Just unzip the new file, run ./install.sh and select to upgrade the existing version.
Though at the moment of this writing there is not yet the fix list available, FP2 solves a bug in the metrics that was introduced in FP1.
In FP1 there were 3 statistics that showed “NO DATA” in the Chat Proxy section. Uptime Start Time Application Start and Ready Time
