Recent Announcements (Cisco, Feature Pack 8, Connections 6)

I wanted to make sure that I posted on some recent announcements, as they do (and will) offer some significant improvements in our offerings.

Cisco Integration: Chapter 2
At the Connect conference, IBM announced the April General Availability of our first set of integrated collaboration solutions between Cisco and IBM Collaboration Solutions.  Expected integration for phase 1 includes the following:

• Launch a Cisco WebEx meeting, or host your own WebEx meeting, directly from Connections Cloud and Verse.
• Click to Chat from Connections Cloud or Verse navigation bar and business card to Cisco Spark or Jabber.
• Use WebEx meetings as your Verse calendar default e-meeting.
• Easily share content from Connections or Verse within your Cisco Spark or WebEx iOS app.

More details on our progress and plans can be found here. 

Notes/Domino Feature Pack 8 

Earlier this month we released the first enhancements to come out of the Feature Pack approach to updates for Notes/Domino. 

Highlights include:

1. Optionally move views outside of NSF for increased data store in NSF
2. Java Upgrade to 1.8 runtime.
3. Increase document summary limit from 64k to 16mb  
4. Add support for ADFS 3.0
5. Document encryption for XPages
6. Optionally enable displaying internet addresses in mail and calendar documents
7. Mail template update
8. Improvements in rendering forwarded MIME messages
9. Optionally add “Group By Date” And “Beginning Of Message” to desktop policy settings

A full list of updates and download information can be found here:

• Release Notice
• What’s new in IBM Notes Feature Pack 8?
• What’s new in IBM Domino 9.0.1 Social Edition Feature Pack 8
• What’s new in IBM Domino Designer 9.0.1 Social Edition Feature Pack 8?

Notes/Domino Extended Support 

While on the topic of Notes/Domino, I want to call attention to a blog post from Ed Brill regarding product updates from the Connect conference.  Among other important highlights, I want to call out this line in particular (emphasis mine): 

“For IBM Notes/Domino 9.0, we have announced that product support will be extended through at least 2021, and extended support through at least 2024. There is no end of life planned for Notes and Domino, and we will continue to update the timeline for support as appropriate based on future releases and market requirements.” 

IBM Connections 6 

Last week IBM announced that we plan to release Connections 6 at the end of the month.  This is a very exciting release, both for the enhancements it brings to creating and managing communities and folder/file sync, and importantly for the new Orient Me capabilities that are being introduced.   

The Orient Me capability in Connections 6 applies advanced analytics to create a personalized and prioritized Home page that surfaces the information that is most relevant to each individual user.  Orient Me is also important because it represents the first release built on the principles that are central to the Connections Pink model we will be employing going forward. Like Connections Pink, Orient Me is built on modern opensource technologies and is deployed as individual Docker containers, the new industry standard for agile, continuous development.  On the front-end, Orient Me uses Bootstrap, React and Redux.  The backend is built on Nodejs and Loopback and separated into various microservices communicating with PubSub via Redis. 

I’ll be writing about Connections 6 a lot more as we approach the availability date.