Hello, it’s a long time that I did an update on my blog but with Q4 knocking on the frontdoor, I thought it is a good time to send out some information.

I get a lot of questions about the future of Notes/Domino, is there any new version coming up ? Is Verse the new client ? Do we need to go to the cloud ? What about the competition ? Is O365 better ?

During a recent roundtable with IBM and other business partners, I noticed that I’m not the only one getting those questions and remarks. This means that IBM didn’t communicate well to their customers about where they are going with the products.

Some interesting stuff has been discussed during the roundtable that I’m more than happy to share with you.

First of all, we received an answer that the following technote has been published on the 13th of september. In this technote IBM communicated that they continue to support Notes/Domino 9 till at LEAST 2021.

Does this mean that afterwards support will stop ? No, it is a message that they still invest in the product and keep on putting in new features.

They will not deliver a new major version but you will get updates and new features in the format of ” feature packs “, this is a more agile way of introducing new stuff into the product.

As a result of the above, you will need to have an active entitlement to continue to download those feature packs.

Don’t interpret this as a dead end, everybody is doing this like Windows 10 will be the last version of their OS, you will get updates en new features in it but it will last as Windows 10.

On the 18th of november they will release IBM Verse on premise, this means that you will be able to use an IBM Verse client to connect to your on premise Domino Server.

The installation of Verse on premise will be as simple as unzip a zip file on your Domino Server.

Make sure that your IBM Connections Files & Profiles is on Release 5.5.CR1 to get all social features in your IBM Verse client.

What about the Domino applications ? If we shift to a #newwaytowork where everything is browser-based, we need to have a solution for the Domino applications.

Customers who migrate to O365 get the answer from the competition to recreate them in another technology.

In most cases this is a big investment, just because they invested in the past in the development of Domino applications.

xPages can be a low cost answer  so that you can modernize the applications and bring them to the browser.

The ICAA or IBM Client Application Access can be an alternative if you don’t care about mobile/browser access to your Domino applications. It can be nicely integrated in Verse or even Outlook when you are forced to migrate to O365.

More news on what to do with your Domino applications will be communicated in december where they will announce ” App Modernization ” tool. When we may expect this communication is not clear but as soon as I know more, I’ll post it on my blog.