My IQ has gone up thanks to Engage

Engage just finished. The first one is under new management, and it is in safe hands.

I don't think I have ever seen Theo so happy with a big grin on his face the whole time. Tom and Kris did really well for their first time out. And they told us next year Engage will be in Belgium.

I had to miss last year's due to the timing and circumstances of the war at home, so it was great to talk to everyone. Thank you all for asking about the situation and the family. It means a lot.

The star attraction was Domino IQ, which adds AI to the core product. As an Admin, all I can say about this is that you will need to spend time building this out properly if you want to move beyond the basic regurgitation of your knowledge base or other internal documents. Also, IQ needs some extra hardware and configuration, so be prepared and read the what's new and requirements docs. Your developers will be busy.

It will be available starting with v14.5, which is coming out June 17! IQ is part of your license if you are under CCB Term(I believe). If you are a perpetual license org, this is your incentive to change licensing plans.

I was happy to see friends from past Engage shows, and in some cases people I hadn't seen in many years. Yes, we all got older, but we still have fun together.

There was a tease of Notes.Next but it is far from prime time ready so don't ask about it yet.

Roadmap sessions were broad with partial timelines for new items.

One thing that also stood out is the added accessibility to all the products which need to be up to certain laws soon and so that is taking over a lot of dev time.

As an Admin, I want to let everyone know to go get Cormac's slides from his session. His session was filled with great ideas and details about cleaning up your administrative items, and as he said, even old admins can learn something new, which I did about SMTP failover routing.

His blog is here, and hopefully, he will post his slides there or at the Engage website.

Lastly, the Lotus brand might return for at least one product. Or not. While this was from Richard Jefts' opening keynote, later on, other HClers implied the name may not stay.
I will leave the debate about the brand to others, as both sides of the argument have their validity.

I was also in some partner/ambassador/HCL Roundtable sessions, which I can't say much about, but there are plans that will help the partners in the long run, which in turn will help you, the customers.

I think my own session scared a lot of people, but I hope it also helped them rethink how they and their teams interact with upper management and budget committees. My slides will not be posted, and I don't publish my Competitive Intelligence info. I will probably make a second blog post about it over the weekend.

Safe travels home everyone, talk to you soon or see you, at least virtually, some time soon.