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
Mailintegration in CNX Ui
HCL Wash
Docs
CEC
Plugins
So we get the mailintegration back into the Connections UI and more apps will get the new logos.
6.5 CR2 — Q2/2020
Integration Strategy
MS Teams
New Outlook Integration
MS Identity platform
Orient Me enhancements + Print PDF
Docs CR4
That sounds really interesting, integrating Microsoft software into Connections is a huge step in my eyes.
6.5 CR3 — Q3/2020
Interactive OM calendar
Leap integration
Sharepoint integration
OneDrive integration
So more integration points for 3rd party.
V7 — Q4/2020
O365 Integration
Intuite UX
Robust mail, calendar and chat integration
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:
https://twitter.com/social_baptiste/status/1216690195975852032
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: