Once again, Richard Moy and crew did an amazing job bringing together Domino subject matter experts, HCL Execs, and business partners to review the yearly updates and showcase the roadmap for the future. This year, due to Covid-19, Collabsphere was completely virtual just like most other technology sponsored events in 2020. However, that did not prevent a record turnout of 487 participants, including attendees and speakers from 34 countries!
Collabsphere opened on Tuesday, October 27th with nearly 70 sessions available for attendees. The OGS was hosted by Richard Moy (Phora), Richard Jefts (HCL) and Christian Gudemann (OpenNTF). Jefts started by covering the HCL Culture in 2020 with data points that illustrated HCL Sales acceleration (Renewals/Reinstatements/ New customers). He spoke about positive customer feedback that indicated HCL’s strategies were continuing to hit the mark, and innovation continues to be delivered even with the difficulties from a pandemic-ridden 2020.
He then took attendees on a Domino historic journey, from 2018 with the delivery of Domino 10, announced in Frankfurt, Germany, to the Domino 11 release announced in Tokyo, Japan in 2019, all the way to the new Domino 12 “The breakaway release”, targeted for 1st quarter in 2021. He also reviewed some of the new features coming in the next release, which will include building apps with Domino Volt, capabilities from HCL’s investment in Cloud native, and enhancements to Nomad.
Jefts finished by showcasing the upcoming announcements coming during HCL Digital Week, Nov 9th – Nov 13th. You can sign up at https://www.hcltechsw.com/events/digital-week/imagine
To finish out the OGS, Christian Gudemann spoke about the OpenNTF efforts and how their community has been providing business value for years. He called out some heroes of the community and highlighted the NTF site – CollaborationToday.info (a trusted source since 2012).
This was only the beginning of the excitement! Tuesday’s agenda was loaded with great sessions, starting out with the 11 AM “HCL Notes 11.0.1 FP1- Performance Boost Re-Reloaded” session by panagenda’s own client expert- Christoph Adler. It was a packed virtual house as Christoph showed attendees different ways to maximize Notes Client performance, improve configuration settings and debug the Notes client when issues arose.
It was great to see that once attendees joined the session their participation never lagged, and they had amazing questions throughout. Tuesday at noon was the first Lunch and Happy Hour where you got to see fresh faces, along with Domino old-time veterans sitting together on zoom, having a beer and a chat. Every sponsor hosted a Lunch Hour session, and each was well attended!
This was followed by panagenda CEO Florian Vogler and his presentation pronouncing “80% less helpdesk tickets with Notes Client Management” – where he highlighted how customers can achieve considerable reductions in their helpdesk tickets by taking advantage of the free MarvelClient Essentials solution and the MarvelClient for HCL Nomad add-on deployed in their environment.
To finish Tuesday, there was another great session by Christoph Adler– “Virtual, Faster, Better! How to deploy HCL Notes 11.0.1 FP1 for Citrix/VDI”. Lots of attendee participation was visible within this session and Christoph answered a myriad of customer questions about best practices for smoothly upgrading their Notes clients!
Wednesday at Virtual Collabsphere carried through with the excitement. Richard Moy had to add more tickets to evite as there were a record number of attendees continuing to register and join in the fun. The attendees remained highly engaged throughout the day and into the Happy Hour!
There were some great sponsor sessions as well. For example, Thilo Volprich of Team Technology gave a talk about modernizing Notes applications using their product “teamWorkr” and how you can beautify your Domino Apps. During the session Thilo mentioned using panagenda’s iDNA Applications as part of the data aggregation process for teamWorkr.
Femke Goedhart, and Jorg Rafflenbuel rounded out the various presentations on HCL Connections with a session on how including a Guides program (local super-users) has helped the Heitkamp & Thumann Group roll out a successful and collaborative Connections environment across multiple divisions, spanning three continents and multiple languages and cultures. And, of course, Christoph Adler and Florian Vogler rounded out day two of Collabsphere by hosting a workshop about streamlined upgrades for Notes clients in any type of environment. For an end-of-the day session it was very well attended, with lots of participation and great questions!
Of course, the big events of the day included a riveting session of Domino Jeopardy hosted by David Hablewitz where three Notes and Domino aficionado’s (Luis Guirigay, Helen Mendoza, and Roberto Boccodoro) participated in the Jeopardy style game providing answers to various categories. There was of course a nod to the infamous Karaoke bar in the Swan hotel, where in years past, many a Lotusphere attendee participated in singing their favorite tune!
The day was ended with a Collabsphere Happy Hour that was well attended with participation from a handful of attendees and great conversations.
Wednesday, the final day of Collabsphere did not disappoint! Richard Moy was still adding tickets to evite, so each day of the show saw the attendee numbers increase! Christoph Adler finished out a whopping 4 presentations with his final session, “HCL Notes 11.0.1 FP1 Upgrades: Easy – Fast – Seamless”. And finishing out a record 7 Sessions from panagenda was Franz Walder – presenting on “Domino Application Strategy: Key insights for successful modernization and migration projects” where he covered the critical questions for any successful Domino application modernization project! As one of the last sessions of the day, it was wonderful to see a full audience and engaged participation.
The closing session was a full house as well. Richard and all participants joined for a “what worked, and what did not” session with the first ever Virtual Collabsphere. There was amazing feedback, and huge thanks to all the different organizers, participants, and speakers.
For customers all over the world it was a valuable and informative three days! When asked if the conference was worth attending, one customer’s response in the closing session was, “I am glad that I attended. It was great to see the excitement and future vision of the software. I plan to go back and watch some of the other videos of presentations that I was not able to attend.”
It was a great 3-day conference! We got to hear the latest updates from 2020 and learn the future roadmap of the products we love. And we got to listen to our favorite subject matter experts. Even with the difficulty of a global pandemic, and the different time zones from our remote communities, we were able to collaborate in the tried and true ways that have made Collabsphere such a success over the years.
Well done Richard; well done indeed!
