At this year’s HCL Digital Week, we’ve seen the development roadmaps for all the core HCL products, including Volt, HCL’s low-code solution. While one of the newer projects in HCL’s suite, it’s a very high priority and has been generating a lot of interest, especially with the announcement of Volt MX.
The main themes that HCL has in mind when it comes to the future of HCL Domino Volt:
Views and Dashboard – now Volt is based on Forms; when you create a page you assume it’s a form which has a submit button attached. When you put data items on a page you implicitly create the data scheme structure.
Needless to say, forms do not apply for every app. You might need to create an application that has pages that display information. In that regard there is an element of what HCL is doing that is broadening the scope of the product.
Workflows is also a theme of great interest for the future of Volt. If you have tried it you noticed that workflows are already quite great, quite manageable; but the user experience around workflow is not optimal and there are some things that are missing in workflow. Automated processes is a thing that all customers search for, and so improvements in HCL Volt’s workflow will be implemented in order to get that.
Integrations – is one other important aspect. The more you can tie your apps to other services, the more complete of an app you have. You will want to access, pull-in or write data, from SaaS or ERPs, you’ll want to automate the flow as much as possible and so HCL is working on making it possible to integrate Volt apps so that you can develop what you need the way you need it.
Works with Domino Apps – Volt is basically an add-in to Domino. Since you already have Domino apps that you are using, a goal is to make HCL Volt work seamlessly with Domino Apps so that you will not be forced to re-write all the apps that you use. This includes being able to read Domino information and many other things.
Usability – providing a great user experience for the developers that use HCL Volt is at the center as it transcends across everything HCL is doing. A team of dedicated designers are working on optimizing the user experience with this tool, analyzing every user interaction that already is or is implemented in the product.
The December Release bring a lot of great updates like:
- Major usability improvements
- Properties Panel on the right, outline and palette on left
- Cleared up and simplified properties settings
- Inline editing
- Corporate themes
- “Contains” search operator (full text indexing)
- Sort by app specific fields
- Name picker
- Emailing attachments and setting name of emailed attachment
- Application history
- Map internet email to role and notifications
- General service error handling improvements
- Bug fixes (e.g. Anon email notifications)
Soon to come in the March Release:
-
View Pages
- Top level page(s)
- No data schema, participation in stages or submit buttons
- Can add display, data items, data gird, HTML fragments to the page
- Can use rules
- Can use services
- Includes JS API functions
-
Data Grid
- Display data from a Form in the app
- Pick the source and select the fields you want to display
- Set sort and filter options
- Filter can be dynamic
- Can be added to a View Page or a Form Page
- Provides select and open form behavior
-
Future Data Grid Considerations
- Display data from other sources, Domino for example
- Open form and toggle between view and edit mode
- Categorized views
- One other improvement in the March Release is Navigation:
Here are the improvements in mind for Workflow:
-
New
- Graphical workflow design
- Improved workflow decisioning rules
- Workflow assignments
- Reminder and due dates
-
Easy to Add
- “My requests” and “request I need to approve” (based on View Page and Data Grid)
- Workflow approval log – track all approval activity
-
Improved UX
- Simplified experience
- Pull all aspects of workflow together
- Set rules based on roles
An overview of how Integrations is going to be improved in the coming year:
Domino Apps changes to be implemented:
- Create and update documents in Domino apps
- Work with Domino apps that are not on the same server
- Work with Domino Rich Text data
- Data grid to work with Domino apps
- Easy integration with Agents
- Examples of what should be easy: Event registration triggers an Agent that creates a person doc in the event directory.
An overview of what is yet to come:
Domino Volt is aimed for Domino customers, HCL Leap is very similar to Volt and it’s essentially a stand alone product. Going forward. HCL Volt Business is planned to become the Leap product for new customers, non-Domino customers, as well as the prefered path for Leap customers going forward.
Volt Business will be a stand alone product that can be used for an organization that does not have Domino skills:
Domino Volt MX
There has been a lot of talk about HCL Volt MX at HCL’s Digital Week and here is what comes next for this great tool:
The first version of Volt MX will come out in March of 2021, and there are some enhancements worth mentioning: workflow design, support for an external rules engine which will allow you to augment the more complex application designs, toolkits that will allow you to leverage Domino and Domino services directly from Volt MX.
The next period (April-May-June) will come with DX DAM and CMS integration so you’ll be able to use your curated content inside your app with just a drag and drop.
The next big release after March will be Version 10, which will come with a lot of improvements.
HCL Volt Iris has been improved to offer you a wizard when you first open the IDE so you can just select the app you want to develop and it will configure the IDE for you accordingly:
The look and feel of the IDE has also been changed and things will be even better, more accessible, easier to use and more developer friendly.
The plan for the coming years is looking really good and we are more than excited about it:
HCL has promised a more detailed session on the roadmap for Volt MX, so stay tuned for the great things that are to come.