During the last week of October, five members of the panagenda team — Francie Tanner, Terri Warren, Franz Walder, Christoph Adler, and Julian Robichaux — attended the CollabSphere 2019 conference. This conference (formerly called MWLUG) headed up by Richard Moy, has been active since 2009, focusing on the HCL collaboration community. It’s in a different US city each year, and this year brought us to Woburn, Massachusetts just outside of Boston.
There was a strong HCL presence, and a lot of HCL sessions about what’s new and what’s coming in Notes/Domino, Sametime, and Connections. It’s always great to hear this information “straight from the horse’s mouth”, and it’s refreshing how open and honest the HCL folks are when they answer questions about what they’re working on. There was even an “Ask HCL” session on the last day, which was reminiscent of the traditional “Ask the Developers” session at Lotusphere from years ago.
There were a lot of friendly, familiar faces, and a lot of new ones too. Over 230 attendees! Richard Moy shared that almost 40% of the attendees were customers, which is a great signal that the Notes user base is still there, and still interested. At our booth we had many great conversations with customers looking to upgrade, asking about Notes 10, 11, and beyond.
The future of mobile devices & how to find the good stuff (slides included)
One of the new things that people were very interested in was HCL Nomad, the Notes app for iPads. During speed sponsoring we asked people which of three topics they’d like us to give a short presentation on, and they overwhelmingly chose MarvelClient on Nomad almost every time. While we don’t have a replay of our live speed-sponsoring presentation, we’ve got plenty of information about managing the Notes client on iPads via HCL Nomad and MarvelClient here.
Kicking off the conference was our workshop titled: ‘Making Sense of Your Data – Finding Paths to Quick Wins, Migration and Cost Reductions with panagenda’ which was extremely well attended, standing room only and we even had to bring in extra chairs. Throughout the rest of the conference, panagendians also presented five additional sessions, including ‘SUPERCHARGED HCL Notes V11 Upgrades: Turning the WORST Notes deployments into the BEST’ and ‘Dirty Secrets of the Notes Client’ by Christoph Adler, ‘Unleashing the power of Analytics: Extracting insights and business intelligence from your collaboration landscape!’ by Terri Warren, ‘Domino Application Strategy: Key insights for successful modernization and migration projects’ by Franz Walder and ‘NotesHTTP and NotesJSON: Tips, Tricks, Traps, and Testing’ by yours truly. For links to all the presentation slides, please click here (or scroll down the page).
More than just a good giveaway
Instead of providing a traditional give-away at our booth, this year we did something a little different: we picked a recipient charity and donated $2 per booth visitor. On Wednesday, representatives from the charity – Girls in Tech – came to introduce their organization and talk about “Empowering the Next Generation of Female Leaders”. Did you know that while both genders enter the workforce equally, less than 19% are in technology?
After the presentation, Danielle Baptiste, Karen O’Dea, Richard Jefts, Jon Schultz, and Heather Hottenstein took part in a panel, answering audience questions on how to increase diversity in technology. The discussion covered everything from brutally honest – “I had never thought of this as an issue before” – to how job postings can be re-written to attract more diversity. Universally actionable things like calling people out from interrupting each other and creating an environment of respect were suggested in this timely and relevant conversation.
After the panel, conference organizer Richard Moy announced that between our booth visitor collection, raffle ticket sales and CollabSphere entry funds, over $1300 was raised for Girls in Tech! That brings the total amount of money for charities raised by CollabSphere over the past 11 years to over $16,000! What a fantastic way to organize a community event while benefiting the broader community.
WS101 – Finding Paths to Quick Wins, Migration and Cost Reductions
Have you been tasked with getting off Domino or decreasing investment into Domino applications? Join the panagenda team as they walk through common business cases – environment consolidation, quick wins and migration – while eliminating up to 90% of scope/cost/time. Find out how your very own data gets turned into easy-to-understand dashboards that show current application usage, business value and transformation roadblocks so you can decide on what should be archived, migrated, rewritten or modernized. Get introduced to the next generation of Domino Application Analytics – iDNA for Applications and get tips and tricks from experts with decades of experience making Domino application environments more cost efficient. Learn about the new our new OfficeExpert solution and what you need to do to get ready for Notes 11!
INF109 – SUPERCHARGED HCL Notes V11 Upgrades
Join “SUPERCHARGED HCL Notes V11 Upgrades: Turning the WORST Notes deployments into the BEST” and learn how you can take the WORST Notes client deployments (simulated multi-user, copied data directories, outdated templates, misconfigured workspace folders, dramatically grown data directories, very slow clients, clients with crashes, etc.) and clean it, upgrade it and deliver it WITHOUT DISRUPTION! No matter how much you try, you will always find Notes clients out there that do not behave or participate! Gain access to the best and latest Notes client management knowledge, combined with more than 15 years of experience with Notes client upgrades to get the fastest and most stable IBM Notes V11 Client ever.
DEV106 – Domino Application Strategy: Key insights for successful modernization
panagenda reached out to 750+ professionals to share their company’s Domino application strategy. Join this session to find out what was most important to your peers and what challenges they had to overcome to make their project a success. Franz Walder presents the exciting results of the survey and explains what role analytics can play when tackling these challenges.
DEV114 – NotesHTTP and NotesJSON: Tips, Tricks, Traps, and Testing
HCL Notes/Domino version 10 introduced new classes for working with HTTP requests natively in LotusScript. This opens up a whole world of easy access to remote REST services, microservices, and other modern web technologies. On the surface these new classes seem easy to use, but there are plenty of things that aren’t obvious. SSL. UTF-8. Binary data. Cookies. State management. JSON limitations. In this session, you’ll learn all about how to work with these classes using real-world examples, what to watch out for, how to avoid problems, and how to test and debug.
INF103 – Dirty Secrets of the Notes Client
Fast. Dangerous. Always in control. Learn the dirty secrets of the Notes Client and how you can turn them into golden features that will make you shine. You will leave the workshop equipped with new knowledge for your next Notes Client deployment and/or optimization project. You will be able to get better Notes client performance and stability by using less of the system resources, like CPU, Memory and File I/O – just because of the right tailor-made configuration of the Notes client for your very own system requirements. Get geared up for your next Notes V11 deployment with the best-practice tips to get Notes Clients deployed, configured, maintained and ‘finally’ loved by your users. Don’t forget, IBM Notes V11 is not far away from being released.
ANA102 – Unleashing the power of Analytics
Unleashing the power of Analytics: Extracting insights and business intelligence from your collaboration landscape!
Today’s global organizations generate collaboration data at a scale never before seen. But data is nothing if we can’t make sense of it and use that knowledge to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently. Join panagenda consultant Terri Warren as she walks you through real-world business scenarios, defining the criteria for and categorizing of various elements of your collaboration landscape. She’ll highlight how visualizing data in real time gives organizations the ability to make fact-based conclusions and avoid the common pitfalls of using static representations of dynamic data. Whether to consolidate resources, lower license costs or identify which applications are best suited for HCL Nomad gaining critical insights and understanding your data makes it possible to keep up with your ever-changing landscape!
