Engage 2020 highlights and announcements from among the giraffes

A zoo? Yes, a zoo. As usual the organizer, Theo Heselmans, outdid himself in finding yet another extraordinary location. The Safari Meeting center is located right inside Burgers’ zoo, entering on one side through an indoor Amazonian rainforest exhibit with exotic birds and otters while overlooking the African savannah with giraffes and rhinoceros on the other side. Participants therefore not only enjoyed the excellent program but also had the opportunity to steal away from sessions now and then to explore the zoo.

ou would expect that with so many opportunities of exploring outside, the 420+ participants would be tempted away from the main attraction, the conference itself. But this was certainly not the case. Sessions were well attended and the sponsor area, located in the restaurant, saw a steady stream of participants eager to learn from everything the various sponsors had to show and offer all day.

It is great to see that over the years this event continues to grow and also keeps on diversifying. Participants and sponsor came from all over the world (34 nationalities!), bringing together the best this community has to offer. After a few tumultuous years with the sale of the collaboration suite to HCL, the transfer of intellectual property and personnel as well as the refocusing of the products, it seems that things are heading the right way. And this was noticeable in the overall vibe.

HCL put forward a theme during their announcements, sessions and at their booth: ‘Evolve’. Highlighting that they are not just investing in improving the products but more importantly, improving the processes that make those improvements possible. Building not just short-term effects but aiming for long-term and sustained growth end evolution.

To do so, design teams are tackling the challenges of developing not just from a feature point of view but from a use case focus. Sales teams and development teams are being extended to allow for more rapid development and market growth and containerization and technical innovations will allow for a faster turnaround on release schedules and updates.

While the event itself was on Tuesday & Wednesday, the preceeding Monday afternoon saw a separate program with workshops being held in the Best Western hotel. All workshops were well attended including panagenda’s hosted by Florian Vogler and Christoph Adler about all things Notes 11, which saw a full room of people eager to know all there is to know about the new Notes 11 client, Nomad and Notes applications.

The Tuesday then saw the start of the event with an Opening General Session in which Theo welcomed all and HCL put forward their initiatives and releases followed by a full program of two days of sessions in 5 consecutive tracks around Admin & deployment, Development, Emerging Technologies, Business and Strategy. Adjacent to round tables and commercial sessions by the sponsors.

SoFy (Solution Factory) was introduced during the opening general session and is a new way to streamline and accelerate the rollout and deployment process of software. By using containerization and the selective update processes, software updates and installations can be brought back from weeks to hours or even minutes. As was shown with a demo installation of Digital Experience, something that would normally cost weeks, done through SoFy in 13 minutes! SoFy will be available around summer.

Containerization and the implementation of Kubernetes, as is already being done in for instance HCL Connections, is clearly in line with this development.

Nomad, which allows you to run your notes applications on mobile devices without having to webify them, was released for Android during the event and is available effective immediately. In case you didn’t know already, MarvelClient is also available and already included in Nomad for your convenience.

Demoes during the OGS showed a first iteration of the new Web Assembly/Electron clients for Sametime, Verse and the Notes Client that will allow these products to work seamlessly on multiple platforms and operating systems, acting like local applications without having to have the same impact or footprint as a local application.

Volt isn’t new of course, but the demo during the OGS showed how far the product development has come in the last few months. VOLT is part of HCL’s program around low code application building and based on Domino. Allowing users to quickly create interactive applications without requiring them to know about coding itself. Release of Volt should hopefully be soon!

On the Connections front, the main announcements were around the new focus on integration into other platforms. I guess the message from customers and partners after previous events was loud and clear: That integration is key! And that is exactly what was announced. Community integration with O365 Teams will be pulled forward in relation to earlier roadmap announcements and is scheduled to be available as of CR2 (ETA June 2020) and SharePoint community integration as of CR3.

It also means that all current integrations are being re-evaluated or re-designed. HCL is actively engaging customers in this process, opening up the floor in one of the sessions for frank discussions about where the focus will be.

A long expected but until now unspecified evolution of this was the announcement that CCM (Filenet integration) has been discontinued and will become unsupported around the end of this year. HCL has indicated that they are working on a migration path.

Many more announcements and interesting tidbits were shared during the many sessions or at the various booths during the two-day event. As usual presentation slides will be posted to the http://Engage.ug site soon.

Overall the atmosphere and vibe of the conference was really good. It was great to see many new (first time) faces appearing among the participants. And even though the big elephant in the room was obviously the threat of the corona virus (COVID-19), it did not diminish or dampen the great atmosphere all around.

panagenda congratulates Theo and his wife Hilde on organizing a fantastic event yet again. We can’t wait to see what next year’s event will bring!

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who contributed to our chosen non-profit Girl in Tech as announced in our pre-event blog. We will continue trying to raise funds at conferences in future and would appreciate your feedback to ways to encourage this even more.