This week I attended the DNUG Connections Day 2020 in Munich. First of all I need to thank the organization team which did a really good job (Thanks Andreas , Martti and Lara ). During the short breaks we had great conversations with parts of the HCL Developer team and other attendees.
Update
I completely forgot to mention Jörg Rafflenbeul ! He was responsible for beer steins, a great glass of quits jar, photos, videos and a ton more. Sorry Joerg and thank you!
During the first session (Connections Roadmap with Danielle Baptiste ) there was a very important announcement and parts of the audience were really surprised. But let’s start with an extended roadmap for 2020 and the final “big bang” on Version 7.
Disclaimer: some of the stuff is marked with “Subject to change”!
HCL Connections Roadmap 2020 #
6.5 CR1 — Q1/2020 #
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Mailintegration in CNX Ui
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HCL Wash
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Docs
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CEC
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Plugins
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So we get the mailintegration back into the Connections UI and more apps will get the new logos.
6.5 CR2 — Q2/2020 #
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Integration Strategy
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MS Teams
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New Outlook Integration
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MS Identity platform
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Orient Me enhancements + Print PDF
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Docs CR4
That sounds really interesting, integrating Microsoft software into Connections is a huge step in my eyes.
6.5 CR3 — Q3/2020 #
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Interactive OM calendar
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Leap integration
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Sharepoint integration
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OneDrive integration
So more integration points for 3rd party.
V7 — Q4/2020 #
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O365 Integration
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Intuite UX
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Robust mail, calendar and chat integration
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Containerization
Kubernetes annoucement #
So and now to the big annoucement. V7 will completely run on Kubernetes! There will be application which still need WebSphere, but these will run already in containers on the Kubernetes stack.
There are several workshops and article planned to help everybody on the transition from WebSphere to Kubernetes.
More sessions #
Over the day Sandra Bühler presented about the MSP cloud offering of Belsoft, ISW and Prominic. Maria Nordin showed the new Activities+ and Stefan Hessler the new parts Social Sidebar, Touchpoint and Invite of HCL Connections. Andre Hagemeier got several pages of his notebook filled with requests, ideas and wishes of the audience.
Some interesting tweets during the day:
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https://twitter.com/social_baptiste/status/1216690195975852032
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https://twitter.com/social_baptiste/status/1216658904693772291
My session on Containers and Kubernetes #
I’m really happy that HCL will do this move and my session did an introduction on containers, infrastructure as code and automation. We get a real good opportunity to start over with Kubernetes and implement the basics of these technologies from the beginning.
You can start learning today and build a Kubernetes cluster for Connections componentpack, so don’t wait until version 7!
You find the slide deck here:
