OpenNTF has grown organically for nearly twenty years. In that time, we have accumulated a lot of projects and a lot of entries in our directory. Just as the platform and the types of projects have evolved over that time, so have our members. Usernames are tied tightly to email addresses, meaning if people move company they accumulate logins. That is also true for contributors, which means logins may no longer be correct, because our contributors are more likely than most to have moved companies. And some of those contributors have moved on beyond just changing companies, but changing technologies, so they're no longer working actively with Domino. This provides a challenge for being up-to-date and as secure as we would like. Thankfully our friends at Prominic are able to identify who has logged in over a period of time. This allows us to identify which logins are active and which are not. So we'll be using that over the first three months of this year to enable us to clean up our data and provide better services across our infrastructure. At the end of that period, any users who have not logged in over the period will be purged. That does not prevent those people registering again. It also does not impact authentication into OpenNTF's Slack - that is managed within Slack itself. But it will allow us to better identify where a project no longer has an active project chef. So if you want your login to OpenNTF retained, please log into the site before the end of March. We will be reminding people regularly in the meantime.

Collaboration Today, your daily news aggregator, has been updated. We adjusted categories for all news around HCL Collaboration Solutions. We cover Notes and Domino, Connections, Leap, Sametime and DX as well.

If you are a reader, please update your RSS feeds. If you are a moderator, please check out the new categories for posts. If you are here just for reading, enjoy the separation of the upcoming curated news about all new products and topics within HCL CWP.

Any feedback is appreciated! Join our Slack channel or contact Collaboration Today directly on support@openntf.org.

Collabpshere 2019 has opened and Graham Acres spoke on behalf of OpenNTF at the OGS.

Graham explained how we are working with HCL to ensure that OpenNTF can support more than just the traditional areas we've been involved in. With OpenCode4Connections we have had a microsite and GitHub repository for some time that has supported Connections resources. And OpenNTF itself has been a repository not only for developer-focused tools but also admin tools, as with the Easy Admin Tools project. We have historically also had Sametime projects and, with the re-emergence of Sametime in V10 and V11, hopefully there will be a renewed focus on Sametime projects.

To enable this, we plan on making some amendments to the projects and releases areas of the site, to enable greater granularity than we've had in the past. Some of this has been in discussion for a while, via the rather small Project Steering Committee and the board. Anyone open to getting involved in this are welcome to contact any of the board members through the OpenNTF Slack or other social media areas.

OpenNTF is still committed to supporting community events, contests and hackathons. And you can expect to see board members visible at many events, maybe more than ever before with Paul Withers joining HCL. I'll take this as an opportunity to remind anyone involved in user groups that we have an open badge available for our community group partners.

Graham also pointed to our Confluence wiki, specifically the nascent Community Guides area - thank you to Roberto Boccadero, Thomas Hampel and Daniel Nashed for the first guide on Domino on Docker.

One other area Graham announced was a new Sandbox server that OpenNTF will be making available, thanks for Prominic, in the near future.

As always, we are looking for people to get involved in all areas. The board is responsible for deciding the way forward, but in our past we have also had specific steering committees for infrastructure IP and more. For OpenNTF to expand across all of the HCL Digital Solutions portfolio, we will need that again in time. And it's never too soon to start. Documentation is a big area and we have had specific spaces on OpenNTF's wiki for certain projects. In more recent years GitHub has provided GitHub Pages for projects, so some projects may prefer that. There are always small useful integrations that could be developed, standalone, like integrations into Slack or GitHub - and no doubt many others we've not thought about. If you want to get some experience, do a bit of personal training around that, and are interested in contributing some functionality for OpenNTF on a specific area, let us know. And there is the #new_ideas channel in OpenNTF if you think there's a project that would be beneficial. We can promote it to help try to form a team, give you a space to discuss scope of the project whether you're wanting to coordinate the project, develop it, do documentation, testing, or just have an idea.

OpenNTF is here as a resource to support the community. This community has always been key to the products, but a community is only as strong as its members. And if the Digital Solutions products grow as we want them to do so, the community and OpenNTF needs to grow as well.

#CollabSphere2019 @openntf @HCLDigital @HCL_CollabDev @HCLMasters pic.twitter.com/P90kTFzAcQ

— Karl Martinsson (@TexasSwede) October 29, 2019