Engage 2023

Engage 2023, my impressions

From 24 to 27 April Engage was held in Amsterdam, the most important event for us who work in the field of collaboration with HCL products.
As usual Theo Heselmans organized an outstanding event; the location, the Felix Meritis was an ancient building from 1776, originally the seat of a scientific-cultural Academy and kept the charm of the time intact. The only ones to complain were my legs, the rooms were arranged on 4 floors to be done strictly with stairs 🙂
Let’s get to the contents. HCL confirmed what was announced last year, namely that the focus for Domino is application development, but this does not mean abandoning the mail and calendar part.
The future for development is Volt MX Go, if you don’t know it yet, it’s time to start looking at it, the Early Adopter program is active, the software is available and you can start using it to develop new applications.
XPages remain alive, and this is part of the tradition started since the days of Lotus, to maintain backwards compatibility of products. If you have applications developed with XPages, they will continue to work for years to come. However, XPages will not be enriched with new features, so HCL recommends starting to use the new tools which will instead have many developments in the coming years.
Another thing that has been seen is the considerable development that the Domino REST APIs have had, and continue to have.
As mentioned, the mail and C&S part is not left out, in fact HCL has made an agreement with OnTime to give their product, which is absolutely the best for managing group calendars, included in the Domino license. The same that was done years ago with Panagenda’s MarvelClient. Even if you only use Domino for email and have no applications, you can rest assured that HCL is continuing to invest in that area as well.
Sametime continues to be actively developed, and the new Program Manager, Trevor Tallackson, was introduced. I’ve known Trevor for years, up until now he was in Sametime L3 support, and he’s really good. Personally I find it great that the new PM is someone who comes from the team that develops and supports the product, I take it as a guarantee that HCL believes in Sametime and I can’t wait to see how it will evolve in the future.
I can’t talk about DX or Connections, there were too many interesting sessions and I couldn’t follow any related to that.
As for me personally, it was one of the best events ever, I had a lot of fun doing the “Tips and tricks for Domino administrators” session with my friend Marianna Tomasatti from GT Tech, we had a lot of participants in the session, honestly more than I imagined, and there were questions at the end. I hope this means that you enjoyed the session and found it useful.
You can find the presentations made during the event on the Engage website, https://engage.ug