Introducing HCL Domino Early Access Program

We’re proud to announce the HCL Domino Early Access Program, a new program that gives our customers and business partners a chance to test new product features early in the development cycle. This program provides a preview of features and functionality that may be shipped with a future version of HCL Domino and gives us the ability to incorporate your valuable feedback. At this stage, we are providing early access to features that contribute to HCL Domino v12. 

The Early Access Program aims to get feedback on specific features, with a more formal traditional beta program planned at a later stage to receive feedback on the overall release quality and language packaging. 

The Early Access Program is feature-driven and iterative, meaning new iterations and code drops will be made available as soon as it is declared ready for testing by our development team. New code drops can be provided in just a few weeks after the previous one, on short notice, without sticking to a fixed release cycle.  

Based on your feedback we may proceed, improve or adjust the feature, or in some cases withdraw the feature from the code stream. The following graphic illustrates this concept:

Each code drop is provided in the form of a Docker image which enables us to ship new iterations faster and to minimize the time to upgrade from one code drop to the next. You can expect us to deliver code drops at a fast pace as we want participants to have exclusive access to our latest product feature set. Please note that only the newest code drop will be available for you to download.

How to Participate

HCL Ambassadors who have registered Domino v11.0.1 Beta Preview will automatically be added to Domino Early Access Program. Customers and partners with a current Notes/Domino entitlement will also have access to the Early Access Program as of today. There is no need to register separately to participate.

For overall documentation of the Early Access Program, the specific testing scope, system requirements and instructions for deploying the Domino server on Docker, please refer to the release notes or see the online documentation here.

Upcoming Code Drop: Automating Certificate Management

The focus of this first code drop is testing a new feature planned for Domino v12 that allows administrators to automate the creation and management of SSL Certificates for Domino Web servers through the Let’s Encrypt® certificate authority.

Including support for Let’s Encrypt was a feature that was requested on the Domino ideas portal some time ago. We are using this idea as a starting point to modernize the handling of SSL certificates in Domino in general, e.g. by moving away from having to create and manually distribute *.kyr files to your servers.

• For details about the new automated certificate management feature, please refer to the online documentation here.
• If you like what we have done, vote for this feature in our Domino ideas forum here.
• To provide feedback on this code drop, you need to have an HCL account to join the discussion in our forum here.

For general input and new ideas or feature enhancement requests, please use the Domino ideas forum here.

Next Code Drop: TOTP

In the next iteration of the early access program, we intend to provide TOTP (Token based One-Time Password authentication). Stay tuned for more information about the next code drop.

We want Domino to be built for you and by you! We’re excited to include customers and partners as part of the feedback loop as we work towards the release of Domino v12. We look forward to hearing from you!