It's Back to School Time, but HCL Hasn't Been Slacking Off Over the Summer!

It’s September, which for many of us parents means it’s back-to-school time, also known as “the most wonderful time of the year”. Traditionally, here in the north western semihemisphere at least, summer is often looked upon as a time when workers slack off a bit, maybe take some vacation and recharge their batteries, in readiness to come back in September refreshed and renewed.

Well it doesn’t look like the folks over at HCL have been slacking off over the summer. In the last couple of weeks, they’ve rolled out a flurry of updates: to Notes and Domino, the Appdev Pack, and Verse on Premises.

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about upgrades and the importance of installing them, even if sometimes it can be a pain. And so, it’s worth paying attention to these updates. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s on offer.

Verse on Premises, the Domino-based mail system, goes to version 1.0.8 as of yesterday. The new release includes a number of upgrades, such as the ability to include comments when canceling a meeting and see your archived mail more easily.

If you’re not familiar with it, the Appdev Pack is what you need to be able to write Node.JS apps that access Domino data. This was sort of a big deal with the Domino 10 release. There are three key parts to the Appdev Pack: a Domino server add-in task called Proton, a Node.JS module called domino-db, and a Node.JS based service called Identity and Access Management (aka IAM). As of August 28, the Appdev Pack goes to version 1.0.2, and the details of the improvements are on the HCL Digital Solutions blog.

Last, but by no means least, a new Fix Pack (FP3) has been issued for Notes & Domino version 10.0.1. The long-awaited Notes & Domino 10.0.0 was released in October of last year, followed in December by 10.0.1. Since then, HCL has released three fix packs - FP1 in March, FP2 in May, and FP3 as of September 9. The fix packs are cumulative, in other words if you haven’t installed FP1 or FP2, you don’t need to do so before installing FP3, and you’ll get everything included in all three FPs.

For all the gory detail of what’s included in FP3, as well as links to the release notes for other releases, take a peek at the Notes/Domino 10.0.1 Fix Pack 3 Release Notice and Fix List. To access some of the links in that article, you may need to register with the HCL support portal. You can start that process by going to the HCL Software Customer Portal and registering as a customer, if you haven’t already done so.

Some of the systems that HCL is setting up around customer support are still a bit, shall we say, suboptimal. For example, the licensing, support and file download portals all require separate registration and login IDs, for now. But this is something that the HCL folks are working hard to resolve. If you have trouble navigating to where you need to be, feel free to contact us and we’ll help, if we can.

All of that notwithstanding, a major release a year, combined with fix packs shipping every few months, is a very encouraging sign of the amount of investment that HCL is putting into the Notes & Domino platform. To talk to us about this, or any aspect of your HCL Notes & Domino application environment, click below. We’re always happy to chat!