Yesterday Richard Moy announced a new contest to provide a modern user experience for DMA to a traditional Notes template.

After contest in recent years for Connections Customizer and XPages, now is the right time to engage with LotusScript and Formula Language developers and re-energise that community around open source.

There are many developers who never made the jump to XPages and may not make the leap to the App Dev Pack. But IBM and HCL's launch of DMA has brought an additional entry point to Notes Client applications. HCL's work on iPhone and Android (tablet and phone) DMA apps with expand that reach across the two main mobile platforms. And with V11 the lightweight client is likely to bring Notes Client applications to any modern browser. Applications built with traditional design elements, LotusScript and Formula Language can have a greater reach than ever before. And OpenNTF is still here ready to embrace those open source samples to wow users and educate developers.

But most client applications on OpenNTF have not had a facelift in a decade. And the facelift given to the core templates is not one that works outside the Eclipse client. The world has moved on, expectations have changed, and it's time for applications to modernise as well. Technology is not a barrier to user experience. Just because it's Notes doesn't mean it can't be fresh, as Theo Heselmans showed with his Wine Tasting App. Paul Withers also delivered a session at Engage earlier this year on modernising applications including adding a DMA interface to the XPages Extension Library database. There is a blog post going into more detail.

So while you're waiting for the template to be selected and the start of the contest, take a look at these and think about innovative approaches.

Once the contest starts, there will be people available to act as mentors for teams. And the template itself will be packaged with the relevant license and notice files, plus starter markdown documentation file, ready for final deployment to OpenNTF. If teams want a GitHub repository setting up under OpenNTF for source control, we can do so. We also advise on issues templates / feature request templates / CLA process integration on GitHub.

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