Engage 2025 – my impressions

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.