My thoughts on the HCL – IBM deal

The news came out a few days, it is no longer a novelty of the last moment but what I would like to report here is not the news but some considerations that have arisen in the last days.
So, summing up, IBM sold Notes, Domino and Connections to HCL for $ 1.8 billion.

Together with these three softwares, the agreement between IBM and HCL also provides for the transfer of other packages, so the complete list is this:

Appscan for the development of secure applications
BigFix for the safe management of devices
Unica (on-premise) for marketing automation
Commerce (on-premise) for omni-channel eCommerce
Portal (on-premise) for the digital experience
Notes & Domino
Connections

Everything will become effective starting (probably) from mid-2019.

This is the news bare and raw. Things of this type happen regularly, IBM has shown this with the acquisition of RedHat just recently (and for much larger figures).

IBM itself had not invented Notes but acquired it in 1995 incorporating Lotus Development for the sum of 3.5 billion dollars.

And already here one thing springs to mind: acquiring Lotus in reality IBM had not brought only the groupware with Notes and Domino, but also the spreadsheet 1-2-3 inside what was called Smartsuite: products that have disappeared but that they had their own installed base and a certain number of users.

1-2-3 was for a long time the most used spreadsheet before being discarded by IBM.

Of course, the acquisition of Lotus was only completed to have Notes and Domino, software on which IBM was aiming a lot and that were in sharp ascent.

But then we all know how things went, especially in recent years when IBM seemed to forget about having this software in its portfolio, not only on the side of new developments but also (or above all?) as far as marketing and commercial proposal were concerned.

However, we are still struck by the fact that what was bought for 3.5 billion in 1995 is now resold within a broader agreement for 1.8 billion.

The announcement of the sale itself does not surprise me: for months IBM and HCL had established a partnership for the development of Notes & Domino. The development of Watson and the purchase of RedHat had amply demonstrated towards which front was moving IBM. Perhaps what amazes us is the speed with which they moved from the partnership to the sale of the product.

Here we come to HCL: certainly their entry into the field has brought in recent months a series of innovations and an air of renewal. A new version of Domino has been released, they are working on the new version of the Notes client, and there is a Notes client for the iPad.

In short, there is an air of renewal and a new enthusiasm that have been missing for some time. Now it will be important that this enthusiasm is maintained and that, with the acquisition of other products, we move towards a global vision and strategy.

I would not be surprised, for example, if over time Domino and Connections converge more and more, perhaps becoming a single product or in any case have many more points of contact.

So I think this acquisition can only bring benefits for those who work with Domino: new enthusiasm, new releases, new features. In short, new life.

Of course, many questions remain open today. There are a number of aspects on which nothing is yet known. For example, how will the situation evolve for those (like us) who are now IBM Partners for collaboration packages (ICS – IBM Collaboration Solutions) or what will be the new licensing policy chosen by HCL.

Or, going into details, what will happen for example to all the IBM discussion forums on products like this: they contain a veritable flood of information and knowledge that I hope HCL will take home and continue to make available to everyone.

I even wondered if HCL along with the software packages has also acquired the Lotus brand and can thus return to commercialize this brand: it may not be such a peregrine idea. Many people still refer to the two products as “Lotus Notes” and “Lotus Domino”; the real name “IBM Notes” is much less used. In addition, the return of yellow (replacing the IBM blue) in the brand and communications in recent months could lead one to think this.

It is certainly too soon to understand what and above all how it will happen, for the moment we can only remain at the window to observe.

When you make a mistake you have to apologize. VoP 1.0.5 and Traveler

Apologies to whoever read my previous blog post about issues with VoP 1.0.5 and Traveler. It is not a bug, it was a mistake on my part.
When I went into the <dominodata>/domino/workspace/applications/eclipse/plugins directory I inadvertently deleted all the jar files: “del *.jar” instead of using the correct wildcard syntax specified in the instructions “*-1.0.*-0.0-*.jar”, core-1.0.*.*.jar and servlet-1.0.*.*.jar .
Doing so I deleted the file com.lotus.sync.traveler.admin.jar and that is why Traveler stopped working. That file is placed there by the Traveler installation process, and that’s why after I reinstalled Traveler on top of VoP 1.0.5 it worked again.

I am very sorry of having created a false alert, but unfortunately mistakes happen…. apologies again to my readers and most of all to the Verse development team.

Problems with Verse on Premises 1.0.5 and Traveler

On my server I upgraded VoP to 1.0.5 and Traveler stopped working.
Looking at the console there were no errors but the devices could not connect to the server anymore; opening https://server/traveler gave a 404 error.

In order to test I reverted back to VoP 1.0.4 and Traveler started working again, then I upgraded to VoP 1.0.5 again and Traveler stopped working again.

The solution I found is to install first VoP 1.0.5 and then reinstall Traveler, when I did that everything worked again, now I have VoP 1.0.5 and Traveler both up and running.

Solved – Problems with IBM Client Application Access and ODS 53

I upgraded my databases to ODS 53, and ICAA 1.0.2 stopped working.

When I launch it I get those errors

Solution: I had to upgrade to ICAA 2.0 and then everything worked.

My company is Domino 10 Ready !

I received this today from IBM

Congratulations! You’re a Domino 10 Ready Partner!

Dear Roberto

I am pleased to announce that you have met the criteria to be one of the first IBM Business Partner organisations to be awarded “Domino 10 Ready”.

You’ve achieved this either by having employees who have passed the Domino V10 Sales Advisor exam or by being nominated by IBM for your fantastic support for Domino V10.

Verse on Premises 1.0.4 IF1 has shipped

You can find it on Fix Central. It fixes the following bugs

I received a new badge

I will be speaking at ICONUK 2018 and Social Connections 14

I will speak with the lovely Sharon Bellamy James at ICONUK 2018 which is in Birmingham Sept 13-14.
Our Session will be on troubleshooting IBM Connections

I will speak with my friend and guru Martti Garden at Social Connections 14 which is in Berlin Oct 16-17.
We will show how to install step-by-step IBM Connections Component Pack, i.e. the Pink components.

The IBM Connections roadmap

At DNUG 45 Danielle Baptiste, Director of Offering Management, has given a presentation on the Connections Roadmap. Here are the most important news announced.

In a future Cumulative Refrash will be introduced new UI for Files, Communities and Notifications

Files UI now is this, defaults to My Drive

In the future the UI will be this, defaults to All Files

There will be the possibility of searching for keywords in file names

For Communities the actual UI is this

and the future one is this

Also here there will be the possibility of filtering by keyword

For notifications, the actual UI of the Newsletter is this

And it will change to this

Let’s talk about PINK now.

In a while will ship the new version of Component Pack 6.0.0.6, and the big news is that it will not contain anymore IBM Provate Cloud, also known as Conductor for Containers. This because IPC has grown bigger and bigger and getting rid of it will make the architecture simpler. The downside of this is that now we have to install Kubernetes manually before installing CP 6.0.0.6 .

The next PINK service that will be released is the People service, which is a big enhancement to the actual Profiles. Here are some screenshots of what it will look like

The future of Verse on Premises

At Engage Barry Rosen from HCL and Drew Birnbaum from IBM gave a session on the future of VoP.

There will be a new release before V10, in the July-August timeframe

Here are the features planned

The there will be a V10 version when Domino 10 ships, these are the planned features

Then there will be a series of continuous releases between V10 and V11. These are the features planned for the first post V10 release. Number 1 is the ability of importing ics files