The last week after MWLUG there has been numerous blog posts about Domino. No roadmap IBM is killing Domino, there is no future for Domino, IBM haven’t released any new releases since 9.01. That is not true at all, if we look at what has been released since 9.0.1 came to market. IBM Domino customers have received 6 fixpacks but they are not only fixpacks they are feature packs. Why, well the Domino http engine has received TLS 1.0 and later TLS 1.2 with new encryption methods. That is a major improvement if you ask me.
And if you go beyond the server and include traveler that I use all the time and see all new functionality that has been released there, and lately the possibility to use the Mobile Verse Client and Outlook mail support.
XPages Extension library has received 17 improvement releases for app development. These improvements has been adding updated one ui theme, jquery and jquery themes. Mobile development components, new xpages components and lots more. Yes, some improvements are better than others.
And with the upcoming FP7 that I hope will include Java 8 support, external view indexes and hopefully more.
For IBM or other vendors to be able to keep up with everything happening needs new ideas and if you look at the market in general the release of new versions is moving from yearly big releases to quarterly or monthly improvement releases. I would rather want more small releases than one big one with a new number on it.
That is the change I’ve seen with 9.01 from big releases to quarterly improvements both with fix packs but also thru the extension library releases. And after reading some comments on other blogs (Johnnys) from Ed Brill a commitment to deliver maintenance until 2021 that is great if you ask me that means at least security fixes, fixpacks and hopefully new functionality. When everything comes around IBM Domino is a great platform to develop applications, run applications on and administer applications on. Yes it has it’s downsides but doesn’t all platforms have that if you look closely.
I remember last time when Domino was dead but it’s still here.
Long Live IBM Domino
Updates
We now know that we will get feature packs and Fickpacks that will include most of the features that where scheduled for 9.02. I really hope that we will get the index outside of the NSF update and Live view updates with a interface for administration of them.
Bill Malchisky has created a two part blog post with a Summary of his talk with Barry Rosen Part 1 Part 2
