We had a lot of work pre-last week to prep evertyhing for the three-day-whirlwind that was about to come down on the Yellow Bubble last week. It was Engage 2025, the first Engage without Theo Heselmans at the helm and he sure left Tom van Aken and Kris de Bishop some large shoes to fill. To say it straight right away - they did fantastic. Engage was one more time the best event in our business - well organised, great food and drinks, great content and great locations.

For us, it was a first this year - we haven't be a sponsor before and we didn't have a booth before - so even more to work on. With three new products coming out at Engage this year, we started well in our 30th anniversary year as SIT GmbH.

Our booth

We had great Feedback and and huge interest for our three products:

  • Our MS365 AUTH Proxy for the Graph APIs was well received, especially the Domino Server plugin that supports Web/XPages Apps and the HCL Nomad Family as well.
  • A lot of people were interested in our integration between HCL Notes/Domino and the PDF Signing tool Documenso. Documenso is Open Source, API-first and can be run as SaaS solution or on premises. We demoed Workflow Integrations and Data Integration with Notes and Domino.
  • Our third product is our ZugFERD integration with Notes/Domino to be able to create compliant e-invoices from Domino Applications. I did not expect so many people writing invoices with Notes/Domino but they sure do!

HCL showed a great initiative around Digital Souveranity packaging existing HCL Software Products like Domino, Sametime and Connections with OpenSource solutions into a cloud offering for file sharing and co-editing including web conferencing and chat as a stack that can run on nearshore cloud provider stacks like IONONS or Hetzner here in Germany. Digital Souveranity is a big driver for my customers this year and I am happy that HCL won't miss the boat here and will be able to come withh a comprehensive offer for customers who want to move back from US hyperscalers and take back control.

Of course there was a lot more to see - Domino IQ, Notes/Domino 14.5, N/D Next with features like HTTP/2 and TLS1.3 support for the webserver. Also, great sessions took place to a wide variety of topics with great speakers from HCL and the community. Take a look at the engage site and check the presenations - really worth the visit. I did two sessions this year - one with Serdar Basegmez about the OIDC Proxy for MS365 and one with Thomas Hampel from HCL about the AppDev State of the Nation 2o25. All slides are already up at the Engage website.
https://www.engage.ug

But Engage is so much more - meeting friends, partners, HCLlites and customers from around the world and engagig with people - that makes this event special every year. Next year, it's up to Belgium again - looking forward to the next round of Engage!

Heiko,