Let's Connect 2026: "Who says HCL Notes can't be agentic? Let Hermes be your Notes-Butler!"

In the next big wave of personal assistants, systems like OpenClaw, Hermes or Odysseus are taking over your desktop, promising the 24/7 available personal assistant that works while we sleep or do other stuff. We have been curious - would we be able to get Hermes to work with the Notes Client and work on our email and calendar and even with Business Apps ? And guess what - with a little bit of OSGi-Love and some Java glue, we can have our own personal HCL Notes Butler - let us show you how this can be done. Takeaways - Learn about Agentic AI systems - Learn how HCL Notes can become a part of an agentic AI system - Learn how to build personal AI assistants

By Heiko Voigt and Serdar Basegmez

Transcript

1. o o o o o o Let Hermes Agent be your Notes-Butler! Heiko Voigt | CEO, Harbour Light Software Ltd. Serdar Basegmez | Chairperson, OpenNTF / Developi L E T 'S C O N N E C T 2 0 2 6 · O SL O 2 0 OC T · S TO CKHOLM 22 OCT o
2. Thank you to our sponsors 2
3. Heiko Voigt CEO, Harbour Light Software Ltd. Heiko is the founder and owner of Harbour Light Software Development Ltd. in Nova Scotia, Canada and SIT GmbH in Germany. His companies focus on Digital Experience projects and workflow integration projects for numerous customers in Europe, Canada and the US. Heiko works as JavaScript Full Stack Developer and SW-Architect and has been around the Domino Community for more than 30 years. He is also an HCL Ambassador from 2019 2026, OpenNTF Board Member and a core member of the Canadian Collaboration User Group (C3UG). hvoigt@sit.de l heiko.voigt@harbour-light.com 3
4. Serdar Basegmez Chairperson, OpenNTF / Domino Consultant Serdar Basegmez is an HCL Ambassador (2020-2026) and a former IBM Champion (2011-2018). Based in the UK, he is an independent consultant with over 25 years of experience in Notes and Domino development and administration. Serdar is Chairperson of the OpenNTF Board, a regular conference speaker, and an active contributor to several opensource projects. Bluesky: @serdar.uk | Blog: https://lotusnotus.com/ 4
5. Agenda 1. What are AI Agents ? 2. Why would we want to let them interact with Notes/Domino ? 3. Technical components and Building blocks 4. Live/canned demo 5. What more can we do? 6. Q&A 5
6. 01 What are AI Agents? 6
7. What is an AI Agent doing? Interacts with user in a Dialogue (Chat) Tries to solve tasks with the help of an LLM (Task planning), tools and skills. Executes the task plan using diverse tools/skills that are at its disposal Memorizes the the way the task has been completed and the results. It persists the findings for later sessions with the user Automates repetitive tasks in a continuous operation model 7
8. Why Hermes Agent as the Agent of choice here? Hermes shines in adaptiveness and learning. It persists new knowledge for future sessions automatically as well as definitions for new skills it learns along the way It offers great automation skills built in It supports local LLM runtimes and has a distributed architecture that makes it easy to deploy in different scenarios It supports swarm learning so a swarm of agents can share skills and knowledge 8
9. What are tools and skills o o Tools are internal extensions to an agent that allow the agent to gather new capabilities inside of its own runtime environment, e.g. support for Ollama as a LLM runtime or bridges to Messenger Platforms. Skills are callable tools in external systems that help the agent to work on a task, e.g. calling an email service, calling a business transaction or being able to read data from a database. * These terms differ a lot in the industry ± so be aware that tools & skills might have a different meaning with different harnesses or runtimes. 9
10. 02 Why do we want them to interact with HCL Notes/Domino? 10
11. Why do we want an agent to be able to talk to HCL Notes/Domino? HCL Notes/Domino offers basic collaborative services that the Agent can leverage to perform different tasks, e.g. E-Mail, Calendaring, etc. Existing business logic in HCL Notes/Domino Applications can be re-used by the Agent to perform single, automated or semi-automated tasks like reading data from a database, filling out forms, creating reports, etc. HCL Notes/Domino offers a great runtime environment to implement business logic as skills with a sophisticated security model, that allows fine-grained access to secure data and transactions. Help with Vibe Coding Applications or Agents etc. 11
12. Why do we want an agent to be able to talk to HCL Notes/Domino? Increase productivity - getting things done faster - automate the dull stuff Do new things faster - become reactive and responsive - reduce time-to-market - try new stuff faster and adopt quicker Do more with less - break up information silos - liberate transactional business logic - deploy more responsibilities into LoB 12
13. 03 Technical components and Building blocks 13
14. Our building blocks for the Demo: Hardware: Apple Mac Studio M1 Max, 64GB Unified RAM, 1 TB HDD LLM Runtime: Ollama with model QWEN 3.8 27B HCL Notes Client for Mac O O Tailscale & Rustdesk for remote access Mattermost (internal) as the Messenger All is local no hosted LLM, SaaS Provider or hosting provider involved 14
15. NSF NSF Our Plugin: Active User-ID OSGi Plugin for the HCL Notes Client Offers a local MCP Server and a local REST-API accessing the HCL Notes/Domino Environment with the currently active user id Hermes Agent has its own Notes ID managed via standard ACLs access gets Wraps the REST-API into a local MCP Server for agent access Defines an extension point to expose N/D business logic in a simple way by calling LotusScript Agents and exchanging data via JSON. Works on a Domino Server as well in conjunction with OIDC Authentication 15 Plugin REST API MCP Server
16. 04 Live Demo (or maybe canned for timing purposes ;-) 16
17. What are the demo use cases? Personal productivity: Hermes will read new invitations from my inbox, checks for availability and accepts or declines the invitations automatically Hermes will read sensor data coming into an NSF via an external stream, generate a chart from it and post the chart to a Mattermost Channel. Hermes will read the same sensor data and check for a threshold and send a warning when the threshold gets hit via a Mattermost channel. 17
18. Data consumption demo sensor data Plugin MCP/REST API NSF 18 % f building f ftask, LLM is no longer needed. Read View data Create chart Check threshold Send notifications
19. o o o o Prompt: Response: Awesome, thank you. Second job is live. Summary: f f f f f; f– ag→ cu 2 S Schedule: hourly at minute 0 from 8:00 to 23:00 (16 runs/day), next firing today 18:00 Logic: reads the full view, takes the latest received_at entry, checks water_soil f3f2f„f f fe f f f f f f tef (plus the actual value + timestamp for context) to Town Square f f2f„f f Anti-spam: edge-triggered with a state file one warning per drying episode, f f f f f f f f2f„lf f f f nf Without this you'd get 16 identical warnings a day. Now, let's add a 2nd Con job that acts on the same dataset. It should run hourly from 8am to 11pm and read the sensor data and check the latest entries for the moisture value. If the moisture value is below 9 percent, please send a warning message to the same mattermost channel saying "Sensor data indicates that watering is needed!". 19 Verified: silent-run path tested live – f fwuncf„f f f lf fuS6f f f f f f f– f reset state correctly the only failed step was the intentionally pointed-atnothing HTTP call, which proves dry-state posting is attempted exactly once). Both jobs now run under the gateway (running since earlier gateway_running: true in the create result). If a run actually fails (API down etc.), it'll surface as a job failure; right now those are saved locally ask if you want failures pushed to Town Square too.
20. Sample outcome in Mattermost 20
21. PIM Interaction Demo Heikos Mail-DB LotusScript Agents ReadInvitations FindFreetime ActOnInvitation Read new invitations Check Availability Accept/Decline 21 Plugin MCP Server
22. PIM Interaction Demo 23 works, now automate!
23. 05 What more can we do? 24
24. What more can we do? The sky is the limit! Expose transactions from business apps to Hermes and let it work on jobs: - read inquiry emails - gather needed products/parts - generate a quote - put it in your draft folder for review Read data from external systems via API/MCP/File and create Notes Documents with aggregated data Read Orders from Domino Web DB and push data to SAP or other ERP O O O O O O Read / Create Design Elements with DXL 25 O
25. Expose Business Logic as MCP Tools via Config 26
26. Expose Business Logic as MCP Tools via Config 27
27. Discover More at Our OpenNTF Webinar 27 November 2026 17:00 (CET) Scan to Register
28. 06 Q&A 29
29. Thank you! Questions? Heiko Voigt https://www.harbour-light.com Serdar Basegmez https://lotusnotus.com