HCL Domino Christmas Calendar App stimulates festive mood at the office

It is that time of the year again. December has arrived and, with it, the Christmas countdown has started. Much has changed in the world in the last years but some things stay the same. For the CEIR team at the University of Koblenz, the Domino Christmas Calendar App makes sure that the festive season is not forgotten.

Every day, the calendar app randomly selects a team member to “open the door” and collect some sweets from a row of Christmas socks in the secretary’s office. In the pre-COVID era, the winner received a simple email saying the candy was waiting for pick up. In the years of the pandemic, the technology had to adjust to work-from-home and Santa Claus got his very own user account on UniConnect, our instance of HCL Connections. The first 24 days of December, his account posts nice little Christmas poems with an @mention to the daily winner. All other members of the community can see these posts as well. For us, this little gem of technology provides an office Christmas feeling, even for those who are working remotely.

The HCL Domino app was launched in 2009. Ten years later the functionality to post in HCL Connections was added. HCL Domino provides the ideal technology environment for such light-weight apps because all the central functionality is already there: joint user directory, database, (scheduled) agents. All we had to add is less than 200 lines of simple Java code.