Engage 2022

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Author: Christoph Stoettner
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conference hcl hclconnections hclcnx engageug engage

View from Bruges Conferences Center

Photo by Christoph Stoettner | Stoeps

The last days I attended Engage 2022 in the Bruges Meeting & Convention Centre (BMCC) . The first in person event for HCL Software for two years. Engage 2020 was the last event before the big lockdowns. Meeting so many friends again after so long time felt really awesome, and I enjoyed these days very much. We had good conversations and some Belgium beer to celebrate the reunion.

This was my 6th or 7th Engage and as always the organizers around Theo and his wife Hilde did a great job, arriving at the venue felt like coming home.

During the keynote with Richard Jefts and Jason Gary we got the new naming conventions for new releases, so Domino will get river names (next version Danube) and Connections will get named after trees (Cedar).

HCL Connections roadmap session with Adam Gartenberg and Rene Schimmer showed the updates for version 8 and ‘Connections v8 Live Demo: Collaboration just got easier!’ with Stefan Hessler and David Bell gave insights to the new customizations in Connections 8 . Like changing the top and side navigation or add a banner notification. The preview of Connections 8 was updated to the next iteration last week, if you are not already registered, here is the link to get an invitation .

Connections 8 GUI - © HCL Software

One of the new features in Connections 8 is a banner to inform users directly. The message will be displayed on top of the page.

New banner function in Connections 8 - © HCL Software

So you can enable the banner with some API calls, so you can integrate into your CI/CD pipeline or tool chain.

New banner in Connections 8 - © HCL Software

I have not made photos from these slides, they will be available the next days on the Engage homepage and I will update the posts with some matching slides. There were a lot of important HCLers available during the event, product management, developers and architects were open and answered questions or discussed features of Connections 8.

If you missed Engage, then have a look at DACHNUG , which takes place from 20th to 22nd June 2022 in Konstanz .

I did the session named ‘HCL Connections Admin Toolbox’ and showed a collection of tools I use for my daily work.

Author

Christoph Stoettner

I work at Vegard IT GmbH as a senior consultant with a focus on collaboration software, Kubernetes, security and automation. I mainly deal with HCL Connections, WebSphere Application Server, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform and Linux.

Sometimes my daily work results in technical talks and blog articles, which you can follow here more or less regularly. You can find the presentations in the main menu under public speaking .

I created a list of tools I use regularly, most of which have been released under an open source license.

In my spare time I read a lot, test all kinds of technical software and gadgets and try to follow about 200 RSS feeds.
Here you can find a collection of them.

This is my private blog, all opinions are my own.

           

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