Another year has come to its end; I must have blinked! All the “old” people used to warn me about that, and yet now I find myself offering the same advice. It feels like 2022 was a bit calmer than the couple before, though the world certainly still has more than its fair share of upheaval and insanity. So I’m thankful to find some stability and positivity here at Prominic.
When it comes to our company, the technology we work with, and the community that has grown up around it over the past 20+ years, 2022 has been a year of focus, progress, and continued development. Here at Prominic we’ve been busy developing products that not only simplify our jobs and improve our customers’ experience, but also add value to the Domino community at large. We also have the best team we’ve ever had, continue to see exciting new features from HCL, and we’re starting to venture into cybersecurity services.
What have we been up to?
Domino Genesis
At Collabsphere 2021, we introduced a free, open-source multi-factor authentication product called MFA for Domino. During Collabsphere 2022, we followed this up with our next big open-source contribution: a free Domino app store called Genesis! Genesis is a catalog of Domino applications that can be used not only across our industry as a public, centralized app store, but also privately for any company who wants to create their own internal Domino application catalog. The best part is Genesis offers simple one-click deployment of Domino applications onto your Domino servers from a web browser (there are command-line options as well).
Genesis can be used to distribute both open-source and third-party commercial applications. Vendors with licensed applications retain ownership over their licenses process, and Prominic is not involved in processing payment (which means we take no cut).
We’ve heard for years “nobody is making apps for Domino any longer”. Genesis is our contribution to help bring awareness and vibrancy to our market.
MFA for Domino
Speaking of MFA for Domino, it’s been a year since we released our multi-factor authentication product. We’ve continued to evolve the offering, adding self-service user password reset (which is useful even just by itself!). Many Prominic customers are already using MFA for Domino, and remember we’ve released this as free and open-source to the broader community. Check our our blog post at MFA for Domino, or contact us.
Solar Power
Our first foray into solar power began in 2022 with the addition of solar roof panels to our Champaign, IL datacenter! This is projected to cover between 5% (gray, snowy December) and 75% (sunny, bright July) of our energy usage at this datacenter, and is a welcome addition as electricity costs continue to rise. We’re considering in the future a large, multi-acre solar farm at our Rantoul, IL datacenter, so stay tuned in the coming years for news on that!
HCL
As for our primary technology partner HCL, they’ve had an exciting year full of ambitious product releases. We’ve gotten significant new versions released for all the core products: Domino v12.02 Danube, Connections v8, and a new version of Sametime Meetings & Chat. Nomad Web is getting a ton of traction with our customer base because it allows you to access native Notes applications in a web browser, without installing the Notes Client. This makes your Domino applications more easily accessible than ever.
Our team (the non-programmers) have also been using HCL Leap (formerly Volt) to start to build business-line applications. This simple-to-use web interface allows smart non-dev people to build systems and solve problems in Domino, without the need for hard-core programming skills. The days of bottlenecks and gatekeepers need to be over, so if you haven’t checked out Leap, ask our support team about it. If you’re a Domino Apps customer with Prominic, Leap is included at no additional charge in all our modern packages.
Looking Ahead
So what’s up this year?
One thing we need to get better about is talking to our customers on a regular basis! So we’ve started meeting internally to build the systems necessary to manage this both reliably and so the conversations we have are meaningful and helpful. We want to make sure you’re getting the most value possible out of your services with Prominic, so we’re going to be undertaking steps to make sure you’re taking advantage of the latest versions of software, the newest features (there are many!), and to understand what challenges you’re facing. We’ll look to have these conversations every 3 to 6 months, or more often depending on our customers’ preferences. Watch for some emails about this in the coming months.
We expect to see a number of new server upgrades and enhancements from HCL for Domino, Sametime, and Connections. With the Domino “Thames” release in late 2023 we’ll see easier (and automatic) upgrade procedures for both the Domino servers and Notes clients, performance and security upgrades to the Domino core, and their next generation administrative interface (good for us)! We also expect new versions of both Connections and Sametime in late 2023 or early 2024. HCL has an aggressive velocity of software and feature releases, and it’s been refreshing to see such a monumental investment in the technology we use every day.
Lastly, Prominic turns 25 years old in 2023! It absolutely blows my mind to think we’ve been at this for a quarter of a century. I was a 21 year old kid when Justin and I started off on this endeavor, still in college in fact! 25 years and 4 of my own kids later, we’re still at it. We still have some of our original customers from 1998. I’ve gotten to know partners and customers in dozens of countries around the world, and have had the pleasure of spending time with them in person. Many of them have become genuine friends.
What a privilege it has been to spend more than half my life working with amazing people, both every day at Prominic and more broadly in our industry. I think the theme is as it always is every year – thankful.
So here we go: onward to 2023!
Just be careful not to blink.
For a full view over the HCL Connections V8 roadmap you can check out this webinar replay.
For any assistance in your journey with HCL Connections just send us an email and we are more than happy to lend you a hand.