2020 has been an interesting year. As we enter the last few days of this year, many people would likely say they will be happy to see the back of it, looking forward to better days in 2021. It is true that a lot of bad things happened this year. 2020 opened with bushfires raging in Australia, burning a record 47 million acres. Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna died in a helicopter crash, the U.S. president was impeached and George Floyd was killed while being arrested by Minneapolis police officers, sparking a series of protests across the world. Bill Gates and Elon Musk had their Twitter accounts hacked. Murder hornets arrived in Washington State. Much of the city of Beirut was devastated by an explosion in the port area. Wildfires sprung up in California. It felt like a raft of celebrities passed away in the year, from soccer star Diego Maradona to James Bond actor Sean Connery, Jeopardy host Alex Trebek, rock star Eddie Van Halen, congressman John Lewis and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And then, of course, there was the pandemic which, as of the time of writing this, has claimed almost 1.7 million lives.
So, definitely not the best year as far as world events are concerned. The world’s economy, of course, has been severely impacted by the pandemic, although many of us who are lucky enough to work in the software industry have remained relatively unscathed. Zeroing in on our little corner of the software world, in particular the ecosystem surrounding the HCL Domino platform, developments in 2020 have been mostly positive.
Domino v11 was delivered just before the end of 2019, kickstarting the new year with a raft of improvements to the platform. Soon after the start of 2020, HCL announced the Domino Volt beta program, allowing early access to the new way of building simple web-based business apps atop the Domino platform, and they quickly followed up the December v11 release with an update, v11.0.1 in March 2020. Domino Volt shipped the following month and June saw the release of a new Domino Connector for SAP. In July HCL made a significant step forward without updating the product at all, but introducing a revolutionary, per user per month subscription based pricing model. That new model was extended in September with the addition of CCX licenses for external Domino users. And with another new major release of Domino, v12, scheduled for the first half of 2021, it’s been quite a year for the Domino platform.
Not to be outdone, here at Teamstudio we haven’t been hiding in our basement all year either. February saw a new release of Teamstudio Export, v3.1, adding improved support for archiving mail files, amongst other things. That was followed up with version 3.2 in the summer, adding support for tabbed tables and the ability to archive local Notes databases. September saw a new release of the Teamstudio developer tool suite, with Domino v11 compatibility plus a number of bug fixes. Version 4.0 of Export shipped in October and added the ability to output databases to PDF format.
And so we consider ourselves very lucky. Here at Teamstudio everyone has the ability to work from home and many of us chose to do so even before the pandemic. So when lockdown came, for many of us it was a case of business as usual. We are also incredibly lucky that very few of our valued customers have been really badly impacted. So as we look back on what’s been a tumultuous year, we do so with gratitude, not just for our good fortune, but for the incredible set of customers, partners and coworkers that we have the great joy of interacting with on a daily basis. Our thoughts are also with those who have lost loved ones or been negatively impacted in so many other ways this year.
Thank you for working with us. Everyone at Teamstudio wishes you joy, peace and happiness during the festive season and onwards into 2021, whatever the new year holds for us all.