PlanetNTF

The latest news about Domino, Sametime, and introducing Volt MX Go

The largest user group event — Engage — was in-person again (finally) in beautiful Bruges, Belgium. Held every year since 2009, this event is where the world’s smartest people (!) gather to showcase the latest technology, network, and enjoy delicious food and beverages. Don’t worry if you missed out on the event (and the beer and wine), we’ve got all the juicy bits right here.

Image courtesy of our partner, panagenda 

“NEXT” was the theme of the event, and that is exactly what Richard Jefts, HCL Software’s Senior Vice President of Development and General Manager, and all the presenters, were focused on. This year’s Engage was all about … what’s NEXT!

The NEXT Big Release: Domino “Danube” 

This release will be coming in the last quarter of 2022, and it’s BIG. Even though v12 was just last summer, and we did another point release in December, we are still rolling out another big one this year! This is more proof of how deeply we are invested in Domino, and the future of your digital success with apps and mail. The key themes of this release are: 

• Better-looking apps
• Enhanced mail security
• Easy meeting scheduling  

What Do We Mean by “Better-Looking Apps”?  

We are launching “Project Restyle” to give you a fast way to easily update the visual styling — the look and feel — of your existing Domino apps. We aren’t touching the code that powers the logic behind your apps with this, so don’t worry about any risk. This is just about making them look better. With “Project Restyle,” you’ll get a new set of design options (colors and themes) that will style the views, frames, pages, action bars, embedded outlines, and framesets of your application.

NEXT: Domino REST API 

HCL Domino REST API (a.k.a., Project Keep), provides secure REST API access into HCL Domino servers and databases for pro-code development. This makes Domino development and access available to a broad audience — without sacrificing ease of deployability that’s legendary with Domino and their preferred programming language and framework. If you’re interested in getting early access, read our announcement blogs about Domino Danube and Domino REST API. Or, sign up to receive our newsletter, here.

During the Engage sessions, we drilled into the details of v12, and shared what’s NEXT in future releases. We also launched a new deployment workshop on the HCL Digital Solutions Academy. More about the “Danube” release will be revealed in the upcoming months!

What’s NEXT for Sametime Premium? 

As you know, we recently launched a major new version V12 recently focused on enhancing your data security, delivering lower TCO, and delivering a customized meeting experience for every meeting owner and participant. Highlights of the release include:

• Make good security decisions every time: We ensure your privacy is protected with pre-defined meeting modes: Collaboration, Confidential, Lecture Mode, plus new member management capabilities. 
• Customize your Meeting experience: We provide personalized and branded experiences, plus powerful meeting reports for those managing meetings. 
• Administrators get up and running faster with lower TCO with a fully containerized deployment on-prem or private cloud.

Read more about the v12 announcement here.

What’s NEXT in multiexperience app dev for Domino: Introducing Volt MX Go

We’re excited to announce the launch of Volt MX Go, which combines the power of our multiexperience low-code platform and Domino to extend your skills and investments in your Domino apps into exceptional mobile, web and wearable experiences.

To bring the Volt MX Go offering alive, Bernd Gewehr at Voessing, a German engineering company, showcased how he extended his field service app built on Domino with Volt MX Go.

This new mobile application extends their existing Domino app capabilities with capturing and annotating photographs of the equipment they are inspecting, while automatically pull location and compass heading from the metadata, elements that are essential for them to include.

Interested in learning more about Volt MX Go? Fill out the contact us form here.

What’s NEXT after Engage?  

This is an exciting year for Digital Solutions products — and there is lots to come from HCL Software so stay tuned for upcoming news and events by subscribing here.

Is there a way to solve the software engineer talent shortage?

The world has been undergoing a digital transformation. Any business in any industry — be it a professional wrestling organization or a chemical manufacturing company — is now expected to have a digital presence. A website, a mobile app on two platforms, and enterprise software are the bare minimum.

Then, add on the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, when remote work compelled businesses to digitize their processes practically overnight. Not only did employees begin working remotely, but a lot of IT infrastructure had to be shifted to the cloud. Instead of relying on human labor, artificial intelligence was called upon to help automate and optimize business operations. The majority of all tech operations in a given organization are software supported, and this leads to a lack of skilled IT experts to solve challenges.

Companies have job openings staying unfilled for months — there simply are not enough developers looking for jobs.

In this digital economy, almost every company has to act now like a tech company, which means they all need software engineers. So it should come as no surprise that demand for IT jobs is growing. US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that software developers’ employment will grow 22 percent by 2029, compared with 3.7 percent for all occupations.

But companies can’t find talent to fill all of these IT positions. There are just not enough qualified and affordable software engineers available to fill the hundreds of thousands of tech jobs openings.

In 2021, there was a global shortage of 40 million skilled workers, and by 2030, this is estimated to grow to a shortage of a whopping 85.2 million. This results in a risk of losing trillions of dollars in revenue, around the world.

How can organizations overcome this shortage? There are several possible solutions:

1.Outsource Overseas

Traditionally, this has been a popular option, because outsourcing’s primary benefit is access to a skilled workforce in a country with a lower cost base. However, the global pandemic has disrupted this model. In order to save money, many businesses let go of their international IT teams. The economic uncertainty and disrupted supply chains instilled caution. Now, outsourcing is becoming a question of risk management: is it safer and more cost-efficient in the long run to depend on an overseas services provider, or automate those services using AI?

2. Invite Foreign Talent

Tech companies have come to rely on closing the gap by hiring skilled IT specialists abroad and bringing them to the US on H-1B visas. Tens of thousands of foreign software engineers have helped companies to fill positions for which they couldn’t find domestic workers. But the program’s future is currently uncertain. The previous US administration banned issuing new visas, while President Joe Biden has returned the U.S. to the visa levels previously established.

3. Upskill Existing Talent

Some companies decide to train their existing employees. For example, they send junior developers to professional development courses to gain the needed knowledge and a promotion. Others find non-traditional hires and train them internally on the job. Or some take advantage of teaming up with coding bootcamps that promise to turn any non-coder into a competent IT employee. The drawback with this workaround is the cost and the timeframe: All of these training options require at least weeks — more often, months.

4. Adopt Low Code or No-Code

It’s now clear that organizations that embrace low code see faster paths to digital transformation. This is because low code empowers citizen developers (business users) to spin up solutions quickly, as well as solve problems they are closest to. Not having to involve scant developer resources to keep projects moving, enables companies to focus on and invest in employee, customer, and partner experiences — as well as respond to ever-changing market conditions. Employees are the engine that drives many organizations, and if they can be enabled to work faster, not harder, then organizations have a better chance of winning the race.

Here’s an example. A professional entertainment organization wanted to help its referees be more productive while doing their routine daily work, like checking schedules, ordering supplies, or watching video replays. The entertainment company holds more than 450 live global events annually, and decided to choose a plug-and-play solution rather than competing in the job market for dozens of programmers and developers to build apps from scratch.

The organization chose HCL Volt MX as its low-code development platform. Now, referees have several applications to help them, while the company is able to quickly build cutting edge multiexperience apps, that run on any device, with a bare-bones IT team. The low-code platform automates many complicated tasks — like DevOps, back-end integrations, and security — and drastically reduces time to market.

And a chemical manufacturing company? It signed up for HCL Volt MX as well. Facing revenue loss from delayed shipments and sluggish procurement approvals, the company was looking for a multichannel digital application to streamline its sales and delivery process.

Using the low-code platform, the company built an open-to-buy (OTB) application, which was an inventory management system. It’s inhouse IT team isn’t overwhelmed with maintaining and updating it because the low-code platform helps will all of those tasks. The app has overachieved its business objective by streamlining the approval process on multiple channels, and the business is booming.

Business demand for IT is soaring and companies are struggling to afford and find top talent. But there are options to work around the problem, and low-code or no-code development platforms offer perhaps the most cost-effective and time-saving way to do it.

If you want to find out more about our industry-leading low-code platform, Volt MX, schedule a demo now. 

Let’s get the obvious part out of the way: COVID-19 had ― and continues to have ― a profound impact on the world, and businesses have scrambled to adjust. The next and less obvious part is how businesses should create post-COVID (or living-with-COVID) plans that account for the new realities facing every industry and enterprise.

While 2020–2021 will surely be remembered as an epic slog, there were some lessons learned for smart business leaders that emerged from the chaos of the pandemic. Enterprise management should focus on supporting teams in their varied work-life balances and directing their energy forward, instead of trying to recapture what existed before “social distancing” became ubiquitous.

To do so requires an honest account of how much has changed: work, working relationships, work-life balances, communication, workflows, online experiences, consumer habits, data security, app development, and so on.  Some change resulted from simple desperation and need, while many transformations were already underway and COVID just accelerated them.

Regardless, enterprises need to pivot away from simply reacting and begin adopting strategies that will form the foundation for a successful business approach for tomorrow. Here are four ways your organization can thrive in an era post-pandemic.

Make Remote Work Work Even Better

We can’t talk about business and COVID-19 and not have remote work at the top. It’s obvious but important: the shift toward working from home will forever change how the company office is utilized by staff and implemented by companies.

A recent Gartner survey of CFOs revealed that 74% plan on permanently moving previously on-site employees to remote post-COVID.  A Pew Research Center study of workers found that 54% want to continue working from home after the end of coronavirus, and it’s been estimated that by 2025 some 70% of the workforce will work remotely 5 days a week. Time will tell what the exact numbers will end up being, but remote work has transformed from an occasional perk to a legitimate way of life for both employees and organizations.

So how can enterprise companies plan for that reality?

By adopting communication tools that connect teams in profound ways, and make finding, sharing and analyzing data effortless no matter the device nor the location. That means persistent and secure chat, video conferencing, and email capabilities, and a collaborative enterprise platform that drives productivity.

Embrace the Benefits of Low Code

The potential value of low-code development fits perfectly into the situation many enterprises find themselves in today: looking for fast ways to generate solutions and be innovators in the digital transformation journey.  Low-code app development accelerates the entire design process from early prototype development to launch and testing.

Gartner forecasted the worldwide low-code development markets to total $13.8 billion in 2021, up over 22% from 2020, driven by the combination of an already burgeoning technology with an increased demand for faster app creation and customizable software.  It can only grow from here.

COVID forced organizations to respond to problems immediately, and find solutions in nontraditional ways and places.  Empowering organizations with a platform that helps them design apps will quicken the development process, save time and money, and boost creativity within the enterprise.

Deliver Consumer-Grade App Experiences  

As more people engage with the world through digital spaces it’s crucial companies provide immersive experiences that are tailored to the precise needs of the audience.  A McKinsey study found that during the pandemic 80% of customer interactions were digital in nature, and consumer expectations will only continue to increase and become more fine-tuned and nuanced.

As online journeys have matured, the fundamental understanding of what constitutes a satisfying user or customer experience has sharpened.  The immersive optionality of Amazon, the customized nudge of Netflix, these platforms have re-shaped people’s basic standards of what an online visit can ― and should ― be.

There’s no doubt more people are shopping, searching and spending online, and they aren’t waiting more than a few seconds for a video to load or link to appear. If they’re not engaged they’re as good as gone.

Experiences need to be made immersive, intuitive and customized for the user.  They should incorporate the latest in voice recognition and AI-technologies, and accessible on mobile devices, wearables, you name it.  Create a dynamic digital experience that your customers will find exciting and worth their time, or watch them click on the link of a competitor.

Security Is Stability 

The success of your strategy depends largely on how secure your operation is. You can have a cutting-edge collaboration platform for your teams, a mind-blowing website interface, and the fastest low-code app software in the world and if the security is questionable it’s going to eventually fail.

Many factors contribute to a less-secure enterprise environment: more remote working, higher dependency on sensitive data travelling to shared networks, newfound accessibility issues and constantly evolving and malicious cyberthreats.

The bottom line is that organizations need to do everything possible to protect company, staff and client data. Invest in secure infrastructure and prioritize platforms that have proven track records of enterprise security.

The past year has been disruptive in many ways, and also illuminating.  Be the company you want to be, not the company you think you were.

For more information on an industry-leading low-code application development platform that lets your organization create engaging app experiences and drive business value — fast — you need to look at HCL Volt MX.