Ok, granted. Statistically that minor glitch in your last Teams call probably didn’t cost you a customer or relation. But recent research by Brucks et al. from Columbia University shows, that the impact of glitches on video call outcomes is much bigger than most of us suspect, and that it isn’t at all unlikely that a glitch is having more negative effects than you may realize.

And no, we’re not talking about fully broken up calls or completely buggy sessions. We’re talking about minor glitches of just a second or two that can already significantly change how the other person judges you or you judge them.

I’ve been working in digital collaboration for over twenty years. I was there when phone conferences over land lines were still novel, and video conferencing was just a distant dream.

One of my most frustrating memories of that era was having to run a software training for a team spread across Antwerp, New York, Brazil and South Africa…. By phone.

Not just because they couldn’t see what I was doing. Mostly because I couldn’t see them. I simply couldn’t tell if they were following or completely lost. And when two of the New York team members got into a full-blown argument with each other live on the call, one walking out with a door-slam I could hear across three continents, I was completely blind and unable to do a thing about it.

That door slam taught me more about collaboration than any training I ever got. Human collaboration runs on signals we don’t even consciously process. Facial expressions. Micro reactions. The slight shift in someone’s posture when they disagree but haven’t said so yet. Strip those away and you’re not just losing convenience. You’re losing the connective tissue that holds collaborative conversations together.

It’s probably why phone conferences never got the popularity video calls later would have. People kept meeting in person because nothing beats the ability to look each other in the eye.

Tools like Zoom, Webex and Teams revolutionized how we meet. Suddenly we could have that face-to-face without the hassle of finding a free meeting room or booking a flight. The pandemic then solidified what was already exploding onto the corporate market, into everyday life. Kids attended class virtually through Teams. Patients had Zoom video consultations. Families stayed connected through digital meetups. The result? Most of us now regularly have online meetings.

Is it the same as in person? No. But overall, it’s a solid replacement with the pros generally outweighing the cons. Less travel, less time, less physical space required. Worth the trade off.

Or so we thought.

Here’s where the research mentioned before becomes interesting. Seventy percent of people think glitches during video calls have little to no impact on how they evaluate the other person. The researchers tested this and found that that is a wrong assumption. Digital glitches in video calls play a big role in how we perceive the other person.

This underestimating of the impact of digital disturbances is not a new phenomenon. People’s stated tolerance for technical problems is almost never a reliable indicator of how those problems actually affect their behavior. I’ve seen this pattern countless times in software adoption work. Users say the tool is fine. Then you look at the data and see they quietly stopped using a feature three weeks ago.

The same mechanism is at work here. You think you’re being rational and fair. Meanwhile your gut has already filed the other person under ‘something was off about them’ and moved on.

When we think about what makes a video call go wrong, we tend to think about the obvious stuff. The call that drops entirely. The audio so bad you give up and switch to phone. The lag so severe that everyone talks over each other for ten minutes.

But that’s not what this research looked at.

It specifically tested minor glitches. Brief freezes. Fleeting moments where the video pixelates or the audio cuts out for a second. The kind of thing most of us shrug off before the call even ends.

And the results are genuinely surprising.

A freeze that lasts one to two seconds is actually often more damaging to how you are perceived than one that lasts longer.

Let me repeat that. The shorter glitch often does more harm.

The researchers tested this directly. Longer glitches scored higher on disruption. People noticed them more consciously and rated the call as glitchier. But it was the shorter, fleeting glitches that scored higher on what the researchers call uncanniness. And uncanniness, not disruption, is what drives whether you trust the other person.

It does make a difference what type of glitch it is. When it comes to video loss longer video loss also scores badly. Tying in directly with the fact that the part of ’seeing the other’ is key here.

This is where the research gets really interesting. And where I think a lot of organizations get it fundamentally wrong.

We assume a glitch bothers us because it disrupts the flow of the conversation. Or because we missed something that was said. Both of those things can happen. But they are separate problems with separate effects.

The research separates glitch impact into three distinct things:

And uncanniness is the one that does the real damage. Even when you understood every word. Even when the disruption was barely noticeable. That eerie, slightly off feeling bleeds directly into whether you trust someone, whether you want to work with them, whether you believe what they are telling you.

Remember those nineties sci-fi films where a seemingly normal face suddenly glitches to reveal the robot underneath? That image is closer to the truth than it might seem.

The research found that glitches only trigger uncanniness in calls where you are looking at someone’s face. When screen sharing was active and faces weren’t visible, the same glitches occurred but the uncanniness scores were significantly lower. Suggesting that the harm came specifically from the combination of a human face and technical disruption or as the research calls it: Social presence.

It is not the technical failure itself that does the damage. It is the broken illusion of human presence. Video calls work because they create the feeling of sitting across from another person. When a glitch shatters that feeling, even for a fraction of a second, something shifts. And it does not easily shift back.

To test this, the research looked at real world consequences across multiple contexts. Job interviews where glitches reduced the likelihood of a candidate being hired. Telehealth consultations where trust in the doctor dropped measurably if the call was glitchy. And perhaps most starkly, parole hearings where people on calls where glitches occurred were granted parole twelve percentage points less often than those without.

Twelve points. For a minor freeze. In a situation that determines someone’s freedom.

That is not a nuisance. That is a real, invisible impact on human outcomes.

This gets to something I feel strongly about. True digital collaboration success is only obtained when the human element stays intact and takes pride of place.

We don’t just sign contracts because the slides were good. We don’t like to follow medical advice from an AI. We don’t invest our money because the pitch deck was solid. For a large part, we decide those things because we trust the person presenting it to us.

This isn’t new. I once worked with an B2B importer where management wanted to replace the calls their sales team made to notify corporate customers of incoming orders with automated emails. It would save time. It was logical.

The sales team pushed back hard. And they were right to. For them, that innocuous call, simply telling a customer their order was on the way, was one of the rare chances they had to speak with a decision maker without immediately triggering a defensive response. No sales agenda. Just a human moment. That was where rapport was built. Where trust was quietly accumulated. Trust that could result in a favorable outcome during the next negotiations.

Automating wouldn’t have just changed the process. It would have removed the human signal and therefore that chance to build trust from the situation entirely.

Glitches seem to do something similar. They don’t block the information. They corrupt the signal that says this is a real person that you can trust.

Companies increasingly understand the importance of software like Teams, Zoom and Webex for their communication. But the prevailing assumption is still that as long as it performs well ‘most of the time’, it is good enough. Hit the uptime targets. Stay within latency thresholds. Keep packet loss below the acceptable percentage. Green dashboard, job done.

This research proofs otherwise.

A call can be technically within spec and still feel subtly wrong to everyone on it. The frozen face that lasted a second and a half. The audio that cut out just as someone made their key point. Even though it’s small, its impact can be massive. This is why organizations shouldn’t downplay the reliability of their collaboration software and invest in good user experience monitoring.  

A platform with high adoption numbers and quietly degrading call quality is not a success story. It is a slow leak as the cost of poor digital experience is not just measured in downtime. It is measured in trust lost, deals not closed, candidates not hired and patients who walked away with doubt instead of confidence.

Minor glitches. Major consequences.

That is not a network problem. That is a management problem. And it starts with deciding that good enough is not, in fact, good enough.

Two headline items ship in 1.0.20: Kiosk Mode and File → Export on Firefox. The rest of the release is stability and security work more on that further down.

Kiosk Mode lets you nominate a single database that always opens on startup and cannot be closed. Think shop-floor terminals, reception check-in screens, warehouse scanners, training rooms anywhere you want people to land in one app and stay there, without the temptation to wander off into the rest of the Notes world.

A word of warning before anyone gets too excited, and HCL says this plainly in the documentation: Kiosk Mode is a user interface feature, not a security feature. It controls what the application looks like and hides the escape hatches, but it is not a lockdown mechanism you should rely on to keep a determined user out of something. Treat it as “shape the experience,” not “secure the endpoint.” For real restrictions, that is still a job for policies and panagenda MarvelClient.

And yes if the old resetNomadInstance=1 trick from 1.0.17 was the “Kiosk Light Mode,” this is the real, full-fat version.

Enabling Kiosk Mode is a two-part handshake. Both parts have to be in place one without the other does nothing.

First, the database you want to run as the kiosk needs a kioskDB profile document. This profile is what tells Nomad “I am a kiosk app” and carries all the behavior settings (what to hide, whether to open the Workspace, and so on). HCL’s documentation walks through creating it with a small LotusScript agent that writes the profile via GetProfileDocument("kioskDB", "") you run it once against the target database and it stamps the profile in place. There is a matching cleanup agent to remove the profile again if you ever want to take a database out of kiosk duty.

Second, the client has to be pointed at that database using the kioskDBName value in notes.ini. This is the part people forget: the presence of the profile document alone is not enough without the kioskDBName pointer, nothing happens. If the kiosk database lives on a server, use the server!!pathname format (for example CN=myserver/O=mydomain!!AppDirectory/KioskApp.nsf); if you are running against a local replica, just use the local file path (for example /data/KioskApp.nsf). In a managed environment you will almost certainly want to push kioskDBName out centrally rather than touching every client by hand panagenda MarvelClient is the obvious tool for that.

The kioskDB profile is where the fun lives. Through it you can decide whether to hide the application menus, hide the help menus, hide the Recent Apps page and hide the Sametime icon, whether to open the Workspace on startup, and whether to hide the properties panel. You can also rebrand the HCL Nomad: swap the application name for your own logo text, or replace the application icon with your own logo image (the two are mutually exclusive if you set both, the icon wins). Between those switches you can go from “normal Nomad with a locked-open app” all the way to a stripped-back, branded single-purpose terminal. For the full option list and the sample agents, HCL’s Kiosk Mode documentation is the place to look.

The quieter of the two new features, but a welcome bit of consistency: File → Export was already available on the other supported browsers, and now it works on Firefox too. If Firefox is your standard browser, exporting is no longer the odd one out.

Beyond the new features, 1.0.20 ships 11 fixes, and this batch leans noticeably towards security. There are patches for known CVEs in zlib, libpng, yaml, and Lodash, plus a fix for a Nomad server crash on launch with Domino 14.5.1 when OIDC backchannel logout is enabled worth flagging if you are on the newest Domino. There are also some very visible day-to-day fixes, like gray form and table-cell backgrounds no longer rendering as white. The full list, with links to each Knowledge Base article:

You can find the complete, cumulative list in the HCL Nomad for web browsers 1.0.x Release Notes.

Every release has its little quirk, and here it is one that hits panagenda MarvelClient users directly so consider this a heads-up. In 1.0.20, HCL added some optimizations for how NOM_-prefixed notes.ini values are handled, and one of those optimizations quietly removed a code path that was still needed. The result: if you point Nomad at your MarvelClient configuration database using NOM_MC_DB (as described in Configuring MarvelClient for Nomad), that database is not picked up. Not ideal if you rely on it to manage your clients.

The good news is the fix and the workaround are both simple. The workaround is to use the MC_DB value instead same thing, just without the NOM_ prefix and your configuration database is honored again. And HCL has already restored the missing code path, so this will be resolved in 1.0.21. Details are in KB0131809. Customers who want to keep using NOM_MC_DB need to contact HCL support and open a ticket to get a hotfix.

The MC_DB workaround isn’t great for everyone, the whole point of the NOM_* variables was that they are Nomad specific and won’t affect rich clients.

For downloading HCL Nomad Web 1.0.20, you can use the following direct link: NOMAD 1.0.20 All other HCL packages are available on the official download portal: https://my.hcltechsw.com/

HCL Nomad Web 1.0.20 is a short changelog with a long reach. Kiosk Mode is the standout a genuinely useful way to turn Nomad Web into a locked-open, single-app terminal, as long as you remember it is there to shape the experience and not to secure it, and that it takes both the kioskDB profile and the kioskDBName notes.ini pointer to switch on. Add File → Export on Firefox for a bit more cross-browser consistency, and a solid round of security and stability fixes on top, and this becomes an easy release to recommend especially if you run shared or kiosk-style deployments, or you are already on Domino 14.5.1. Just keep the NOM_MC_DB quirk in mind if you manage clients with panagenda MarvelClient: switch to MC_DB for now, or wait for 1.0.21 where it is already fixed.

First, the part nobody put on the agenda. Mercedes-Benz World in Weybridge turned into a furnace. 42 degrees on Wednesday, 40 on Thursday. No session covered it. Every attendee lived through it. If you were there, you know exactly what I mean.

The reaction that came up again and again: people were surprised at how well TrueDEM can do intra-call analytics in real time.

Most teams are used to working with CQD. It gives you aggregated quality data and solid trend lines. But you read it after the fact, and it works at the level of the aggregate, not the live call.

TrueDEM works while the call is happening, collecting data and making it accessible to you right away. We see the call as the user experiences it, in real time, with real data from the endpoint. For a lot of visitors that was a genuine shift. They are used to looking back at aggregated numbers. We let them watch the call as it unfolds with full insights.

AI was the thread running through the whole event. It was the subject of the opening keynote. It was on stands across the floor, from intelligent call routing to AI based call analytics and conversational AI.

With TrueDEM we enhance what AI can do by providing the data underneath it.

One of the things we were able to demonstrate is our prototype of how TrueDEM is able to expose its data through an MCP integration, which means it can feed AI agents directly. By using MCP, TrueDEM is also AI agnostic, so any tool that supports MCP and OAuth, can work with our data. What struck people was not a clever demo. It was the depth and quality of the data we can hand to an AI system. Good answers need good data. That is the part we bring.

One more thing worth mentioning. Our booth sat next to AudioCodes. No coincidence, as the two solutions line up well.

AudioCodes OVOC gives you a strong view of the voice infrastructure: the SBCs, the gateways, the routing layer, and the carrier side of a call. TrueDEM picks up at the user end, measuring the actual Teams client experience across the wider Microsoft 365 stack. Infrastructure health on one side, real user experience on the other. For organizations running Enterprise Voice, the two together cover the full picture.

Last but not least: Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth at Commsverse 2026. Events like this test the way we explain what we do, and they sharpen it, helping us hone how to further improve our product.

If you want to see what your Teams users are really experiencing, in real time rather than after the fact, or have full fidelity data on any Teams call, that is exactly what TrueDEM was built for. Take a closer look here.

In total, HCL Notes and Domino 12.0.2 Fix Pack 8 contains fixes for approximately 40 known issues. Clearly, deploying the current Fix Pack isn’t just a good idea — it’s essential for keeping a mature 12.0.2 environment stable and secure. Fix Packs are always cumulative, so HCL Notes Domino 12.0.2 Fix Pack 8 includes everything from FP1 through FP7. They are also language independent and can be applied on top of any language version of a 12.0.2.x installation. The selection criteria remain unchanged: low-risk, high-impact fixes that address the defects affecting the broadest set of customers, plus security patches and JVM updates. Here is the breakdown by area.

If you want to see a detailed list of all included fixes and SPR numbers, you can find it here in the HCL Fix List.

You can download HCL Notes and Domino 12.0.2 Fix Pack 8 from the HCLSoftware download portal.

Here, I would make a clear recommendation. HCL Notes Domino 12.0.2 Fix Pack 8 is a cumulative, low-risk collection of fixes that resolves a good spread of real-world issues — replica bloat from orphaned RRV objects, database cache crashes, an SSO/SAML LDAP group-authentication regression, several iNotes/Verse mail rendering problems, and the macOS native memory growth that many client users will appreciate. The SAML/LDAP and security fixes alone make it worth scheduling. Combined with the updated JVM and timezone data, the direction is clearly right. My advice: download and install it.

One thing to plan for: this Fix Pack ships an updated Forms9.nsf template, so if you have customized that template, review it before rolling out.

If you are a MarvelClient Upgrade customer, integrating Fix Pack 8 into your Notes 12.0.2 client setup is very easy. If you would like assistance, or are interested to learn more about MarvelClient Upgrade, reach out and let’s connect.

Shared mailboxes are one of those things that exist in every Microsoft 365 tenant but rarely get the attention they deserve. They’re not glamorous. They’re not exciting. And with everything else going on in a typical IT environment, from Teams call quality issues to new features rolling out and network migrations, they tend to just sit there doing their thing.

So, let’s dive into this somewhat overlooked topic and why it matters.

Your support@, info@, helpdesk@, billing@ addresses are often the first touchpoint customers have with your organization and a crucial part of internal operations. They handle critical communication streams: customer complaints, invoice disputes, internal IT requests. And yet, they fall into this weird no man’s land. They don’t belong to a specific person. There’s no user logging in every morning thinking: “hmm, something feels off today.” Instead, five, maybe ten people dip in and out during the day, and every one of them assumes someone else has it covered.

Most M365 admins work with shared mailboxes daily, but there are a few characteristics that tend to catch people off guard.

Free, unlimited, and ungoverned. Shared mailboxes up to 50GB don’t require a license (note: users using them do need to have an Exchange subscription) and there is no limit to how many Shared Mailboxes you can create per tenant. Great for the budget, not so great for governance. In practice this means shared mailboxes tend to accumulate over the years without anyone keeping track.

25 users is the safe maximum. Microsoft states that a shared mailbox supports up to 25 concurrent users. Beyond that, connection failures and weird sync issues can occur. For a busy support mailbox during peak hours, that limit of 25 users is easier to hit than you’d think. Microsoft actually recommends using a Microsoft 365 Group instead but that raises a whole different set of questions on why you should use either a shared mailbox or a M365 Group. For now, let’s use what Copilot’s has to say about that when asked about the difference: “Shared Mailboxes are better used when the mail in it is the work (HR@…, Support@…, Etc.), while a Microsoft 365 Group is used to support the work”.

No encryption on outbound mail. Because a shared mailbox has no security context of its own (no username/password), emails sent from it can’t be encrypted. If members would encrypt with their own keys, other members wouldn’t be able to read those messages.

Licensing would unlock more than just storage. Most organizations run shared mailboxes unlicensed. That works fine until you need litigation hold, in-place archiving, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, eDiscovery, or retention policies. All of these require assigning a license (typically Exchange Online Plan 2). Many admins only discover this gap when legal or compliance actually comes knocking.

Legacy mailboxes may behave differently. Unlicensed shared mailboxes created before July 2018 were provisioned with 100GB instead of 50GB. If you’re wondering why some of your mailboxes have more space than others, that’s likely why.

If reading the above made you want to check what’s actually going on in your tenant, here’s where to look.

In the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, go to Teams & Groups > Shared mailboxes for a dedicated overview. For storage and quota info, go to Reports > Usage > Exchange > Mailbox usage and switch the dropdown at the top right to “Shared.”

Alternatively, use PowerShell to get info:

will provide you with all info available. Note! Microsoft recommends using

instead for any Exchange Online environments.

It is worth doing an audit periodically. You might be surprised by how many shared mailboxes exist that nobody actively uses or even remembers creating.

So, we know shared mailboxes are free, easy to create, hard to track, and central to business communication. The Admin center provides information on usage, storages and quotas but what about performance monitoring?

Reality is that when users report “it’s slow”, in most organizations IT starts guessing…

Shared mailboxes are created in the region where the tenant resides. For organizations with offices across multiple geographies, that means users may be accessing mailboxes hosted on the other side of the world. Some latency is expected in those cases, but the question is: how do you tell the difference between normal geographic delay, a network problem, or actual service degradation?

The short answer is, without active measurement, you can’t.

The Microsoft admin center won’t help you here. It gives you mailbox counts, storage stats, and quota info. What it doesn’t give you is actual access performance data from the user’s perspective.

At panagenda, we work closely with our customers to identify where more insight into user experience is needed and Shared mailboxes kept coming up. That’s why we’re currently in the final phases of testing new M365 scans that measure shared mailbox access latency per user, identify which backend servers are involved, and surface performance differences across regions and locations.

Contact us if you’re interested in learning more about these and other Exchange scans that we are planning to release. As “somebody will probably notice”, is not a reliable monitoring strategy. Especially not when it comes to the mailboxes that make your organization run smoothly.

I travelled to Ghent with my colleagues Florian Vogler and Franz Walder, and together we had the privilege of delivering a workshop and three sessions. What follows is my personal recap — the sessions, the booth, the social moments, and the themes that stood out.

We kicked off on Monday, April 20, with our half-day panagenda workshop — a fast-paced, deliberately fun tour through what AI is actually doing to our work right now. Highlights:

Franz Walder — “Data Retention Compliance: Know What You Must Keep” (Tue & Wed morning). A practical framework for using Content Age and retention analytics to separate legally protected Domino records from content that can be safely archived.

Florian Vogler — “Move It! 64-Bit, Nomad & more” (Wed morning). Classic Florian — a no-fluff decision framework on why, how, what, and when to modernise Notes clients and applications without breaking what already works.

Marc Thomas — “Inside HCL Notes 2026 Upgrade” (Wed afternoon). Everything admins need for a clean 14.5.1 rollout, with one headline many people took away: HCL Notes 14.5.1 installs 61% faster than 14.5.0 — 24s vs. 62s per endpoint. Bonus track: Daniel Nashed’s nshcpuset workaround for the hybrid-CPU E-Core scheduling issue.

Our booth ran full-portfolio demos all week. A small spotlight this year was on iDNA for application intelligence and modernisation readiness. One prototype we were most excited to show was a working MCP server as a Notes Client plugin — a real, live integration that lets AI assistants talk to Notes/Domino in a structured way. It wasn’t a slide; it was running on a laptop and happy to answer questions. The number of “wait, you can already do this?” reactions made the week.

No Engage recap would be complete without coming back to the giveaway we ran in the run-up to the conference. As Platinum Sponsor of Engage 2026, we gave away one exclusive Engage 2026 Experience Package — three nights in Ghent, a full conference ticket, and a seat at the official VIP Dinner.

The drawing took place at the end of our webinar “HCL Notes 2026 durchleuchtet“ on 31 March 2026, and we’re delighted that Dirk Kirchhof from our customer Nolte Küchen walked away with the package. It was great to welcome Dirk on-site in Ghent, to shake hands at the booth, and to share a few of the conversations and experiences that make Engage such a special week for the community.

A huge thank you to everyone who entered, and congratulations once again to Dirk. See you all at the next one!

Richard Jefts and the HCL keynote on Tuesday morning were unmistakably shaped by AI. The direction for the next 12 months was clear: Agentic AI, Vibe Coding, and Generative AI across the product line. Richard also announced new partnerships with Collabra and IONOS, and teased Domino Workspace, expected mid-year. Throughout the conference, every product area — Domino/Notes, Sametime, Connections — had its own dedicated roadmap session. Seeing that progress, publicly and consistently, was genuinely well received by the community.

And one more moment I have to mention: during the Welcome speech, our colleague Christoph Adler made it onto the big stage with a short message. Christoph couldn’t be with us in Ghent this year for private reasons, but he still managed to wish everyone a great conference from afar. He would have loved the reaction from the room — it was exactly the kind of appearance that feels like family.

Ghent is a beautiful city, and the organisers used it well. On Monday evening, after the workshops, we joined the other speakers and attendees at the Ambassadors Welcome Reception at RAY, right in the heart of the city. Reconnecting with the HCL Ambassadors in person is one of those things that never gets old.

Tuesday evening then delivered the traditional highlight: the engage Dinner at Wintercircus. At 19:00 the whole conference travelled together to this beautifully restored old circus building for an evening of great food and even better conversations. Unusual venue, perfect atmosphere — exactly the kind of shared experience that makes Engage feel less like a conference and more like a reunion.

That’s the feeling I’m taking home from Ghent: AI is changing our daily work faster than any of us expected, the HCL roadmap is moving visibly forward, and the Notes/Domino community still knows how to gather, share, and celebrate. Whether you dropped by our booth, attended one of our sessions, or simply shared a Belgian beer with us — thank you. Already looking forward to the next one.

panagenda was proud to be sponsoring, on stage, at the booth, and around every dinner table at Engage 2026. If you’d like to pick up any of the topics above — Domino upgrades, 64-bit/Nomad modernisation, retention compliance, or our AI work around iDNA — just reach out, we’re happy to continue the conversation.

Meeting assistant bots have become a fixture of modern work life. Whether AI-powered or a simpler automated tool, they transcribe, record, summarize, and follow up so you don’t have to. The productivity gains are real. But so is the risk.

Uninvited Bots joining your Microsoft Teams meetings are a potential security nightmare. We touched upon this in an earlier blog, Meeting Bots: Helpful Assistant or Security Nightmare?  Bots were sometimes hard to distinguish from human attendees. For that reason, Microsoft previously allowed admins to enforce lobby use and set up an additional verification check that forced anyone entering the lobby to complete a CAPTCHA challenge.  —  This approach was designed to block non-human attendees, but it created unnecessary friction for legitimate users in the process. Microsoft is changing this.

Here’s what you need to know.

Microsoft has announced a significant update that directly addresses the bot visibility gap in Teams meetings. Under Message Center notification MC1251206 (Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 558107), Teams will now natively detect and label external meeting assistant bots as they attempt to join meetings hosted by your organization.

This is a big improvement — and a direct response to growing enterprise demand for meeting governance.

Starting mid-May 2026 (Targeted Release) through mid-June 2026 (General Availability, including GCC tenants), Teams will:

Bot detection will be enabled by default for all tenants, with no action required to activate the feature. Microsoft recommends keeping the default approval-required setting, and admins can choose stricter or more permissive options based on organizational needs.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft classifies this change as one that introduces AI/ML detection logic — specifically, it analyzes meeting join metadata to identify external automated bots. This is not a passive change. It’s an active detection layer, and it signals that Microsoft is treating meeting bot governance as a first-class compliance concern, not an afterthought.

Here’s where organizations need to stay sharp: not all bots will be detected. Microsoft is transparent about this — some bots may evade detection based on their intrinsic behavior. Microsoft is actively asking users to report undetected bots from within the app to help improve the system over time.

That’s not a criticism of the feature — it’s a realistic acknowledgment of the cat-and-mouse nature of bot detection. But it does mean that Microsoft’s built-in detection is a necessary layer, not a sufficient one.

Microsoft’s detection is a solid foundation, but as stated it’s not foolproof. For organizations that want to close that gap and need to know  if bots joined and if so, which version, and which backend host it communicated with,  panagenda TrueDEM will provide  meeting-level bot attribution that native tooling simply doesn’t surface.

For a thorough look at why this level of visibility matters, Stefan Fried’s research paper “What Powers Your Teams Meetings?” is well worth a read.

Microsoft’s MC1251206 update is a step in the right direction — one that every Teams admin should pay attention to. Here’s what we recommend:

Because knowing exactly who’s in the room shouldn’t be left to chance.

To help IT leaders better understand the evolving landscape of digital collaboration, we are excited to release our latest research report: “What Powers Your Teams Meetings – A Research Driven Breakdown of Microsoft Teams Meeting Applications“.
In this data-driven report, we move beyond the basic metrics to explore what call data can tell us about applications and bots running in Teams calls. Utilizing a data set of over 1 million calls in a period of 30 days, this report is a culmination of extensive analysis and real-world telemetry, giving insight into:

At panagenda, we believe that data is only as good as the expertise behind it. That’s why we are proud to highlight the author of this report: Stefan Fried. Stefan is Senior Program Manager and one of the industry’s leading voices in Teams call analytics.
With over 20 years of experience in collaboration infrastructure, Stefan has spent his career decoding the complexities of digital experience monitoring. His deep understanding of how Teams behaves both in the cloud, as well as across home Wi-Fi, local ISPs, and diverse hardware, is what powers our most innovative solutions like TrueDEM.

Take Control of Your Collaboration Strategy

Whether you are troubleshooting a single CEO call or optimizing a global rollout, understanding the “why” behind your meeting performance is critical. Our experts and products provide the blueprint for moving from reactive troubleshooting to proactive optimization.
 

Bots and AI meeting assistants are great for productivity but are a potential security nightmare if left unattended. Even if not intended as malicious, they can cause all kinds of red flags from data residency concerns to the loss of legal confidentiality. Bots can pose a bigger liability than you might realize. Reclaim control by hardening your Teams Lobby settings, training your “Human Firewall,” and using advanced monitoring to see exactly which bots are joining your organization’s calls.

Are bots taking over our meetings? And if so, what are they doing?

More and more bots are being introduced that add value to meetings & calls. From native Microsoft bots that perform tasks like translation, recording or managing call queues, to external tools like Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai that perform notetaking and virtual assistant tasks, to self-built bots your organization deploys to do anything from compliance monitoring and security to simple call handling.

End users will generally see these bots appear as attendees. Often with names related to the task they perform (e.g. “[users name] note taker”) or the product they represent. Rarely enough for users to fully understand why they are there and what that implies.

Then there is the situation where bots are not shown or try to hide their identity. Most of Microsoft’s native bots for instance do not show up in the attendee list which is probably not very concerning as these are after all part of the standard toolkit of Teams but there are other bots that are, or might try to be, unnoticed. Not necessarily for malicious purposes, but still, they can pose risks you might not be aware of.

In theory, any bot joining a meeting has a participant ID and is shown in the participants roster as well as has a video tile. However, bots can try to hide or subdue their presence. Sometimes on purpose, for malicious purposes, or to not intrude, like in the case of compliance bots. And sometimes, it’s actually just unintended like this forum post highlights. It does mean though that there are ways in which a bot can go undetected and not show up in the participant roster or video tiles.

Another way in which bots try to hide their identity is by simply taking a name that could be seen as a normal person. Especially in larger meetings it can go undetected like that. Fireflies.ai’s virtual assistant is for instance called ‘Fred’. If you’re organizing a larger meeting with externals and one of these uses Fireflies.ai, you might be forgiven to not know that the ‘Fred’ in the lobby is not an actual person. Especially if your own organization doesn’t use Fireflies.ai.

Another element of these virtual meeting assistants is that they often request access to the user’s calendar, allowing them access to each meeting invite the user has in their calendar which they will then try to automatically join. Even those in which you really might not want that. For example: in an HR meeting or a financial or confidential meeting. Especially as services like that tend to send out meeting summaries to all participants afterwards, even those that did not attend.

An example of how damaging this could be for an organization is nicely explained in this blog from MLT Aikins.

So, what are the risks of bots in meetings in general?  There are several risks associated with bots, and not all include malicious intent.

Data residency & security: Bots that collect information store that data on a server. In the case of third-party vendors, this could mean sensitive information is stored outside of the IT department’s control. Which could compromise security as well as regulatory, industry and company compliance. Worse even, when the application is a ‘free’ app and there is no formal contract arranging data ownership, security and residency.

Data quality & ownership: Bots interpret and process data, this means that some of the data might not even be accurate. This brings us to the next risk, which is that vendors might use the collected data to train their bots. Which could mean that knowledge derived from your meetings and (correctly or incorrectly) interpreted by a bot is used to assist other customers.

Legal consequences: Apart from the obvious jurisdiction, compliance and security risks, having bots in meetings could also pose some other, perhaps not expected, legal consequences. There are some interesting articles on what the implications of data collected by third-party bots during meetings could be. Including loss of client-lawyer privilege and altered disclosure status. 

Needless to say that it is important to be aware of the risks of having bots in meetings and to take steps to both monitor and safeguard the use of them.

The most effective way to block unwanted bots is to ensure that they cannot enter a meeting without human intervention.

Microsoft realizes the risks of bots entering meetings unwanted and has recently added options that allow you to have automatic verification if it is a bot or human before even admitting them to the lobby.

Many bots join because a user has “installed” a 3rd-party application (like a note-taker). Admins can control this at the source.

This one can be tricky. Most legitimate bots have a name & icon that makes clear what it is and what it does. Some however don’t. Microsoft’s 2026 UI now makes it somewhat easier to identify these entities. In the meeting roster:

All of the above makes one thing clear. None of this will be waterproof. Even if you restrict external access, block anonymous access, or harden the lobby restrictions, there will always be situations or users that require exceptions. Based on their specific role or on the meeting context. Furthermore, users might join meetings initiated by external users where other configurations are at play. You have no control over those meetings and what bots join those calls. Deliberately or unintentionally.

And that’s why it is crucial to not just look at this as a ‘technical’ problem to solve with settings and restrictions but as one that requires active training and awareness from your users.  Users should know how to identify a bot, be aware of what the risks are, and been given instructions on how to act when they do not trust the situation. Most importantly, they need to feel empowered to speak up so meeting organizers can take steps, be cautious with information until the situation is clarified and report to an administrator what they encountered if they feel uncomfortable.

Finally, is it enough to just rely on settings and user awareness? No. As said, there are almost always exceptions that do require active monitoring. Even for legitimate bots where you want to know if things like the host changed or if it’s running on the right version.

Monitoring which bots are joining users’ meetings can be a challenge for admins. Microsoft’s Team Admin Center tells you a non-native bot joined the meeting but often just names it “bot”. Which doesn’t explain if this was a sanctioned or unsanctioned bot. Nore does it provide any other details important to ensure that it’s a trusted bot. With TrueDEM, in-depth bot information is available, from name & version to the backend-host they run on. This allows admins to directly see which bots joined which meeting and which backend-host they utilize. For more on Native and non-native meeting bot monitoring and it’s importance, check out Stefan Fried’s paper.

Microsoft AppLocker is an application intended to provide control over applications and files on local systems. In my case, however, it led to some severe headaches and, ultimately, an unexpected outcome; one even Microsoft did not anticipate. So, let’s dive into the topic.

At panagenda, we offer a Digital Experience Monitoring solution which requires customers to install a packaged application on Windows. This application has a simple design with minimal requirements, and is signed by a certificate issued by the Global Root CA.

Customers who use AppLocker Rules are requested to add our application to the list of trusted packaged apps if there is no existing rule that trusts all signed packaged apps.  Typically, an AppLocker Administrator adds the rule on an administrative computer. The policy is then exported and applied to Endpoint Manager (formerly Intune) to be deployed to all client devices.

The problem arose tough, when the app got blocked although the allow rule was active and available. Windows Eventlog didn’t provide much detail, other than a very generic message without any details other than that there is no rule which would allow this application. Very helpful, right?

When adding an AppLocker rule in the MMC UI, you typically select the app and make a few adjustments. We advise customers to use wildcards for the package name and version, restricting the rule at the publisher level only (see screenshot).

You might think everything is set up correctly, but it is not.

If you take a look at the Publisher String of the certificate within the app, it looks like this:

Not really special. Pretty much the same as if you would take the publisher’s information for any other application like for instance Adobe.

After creation, the rule needs to be exported as XML and then imported into Endpoint Manager for further distribution to the endpoints. And here is where things went south.

It turns out that in the exported rule, the PublisherName string was truncated after 260 characters!

Microsoft specifies that the Publisher string must match exactly when AppLocker evaluates its rules. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/application-security/application-control/app-control-for-business/applocker/understanding-the-publisher-rule-condition-in-applocker. The truncated string meant that the evaluation would always fail.

Is export the issue here, or is something else causing the problem?

In fact, it was not the export, but indeed something else. Basically, you create the rule, pick the application and then set the publisher level – you would assume that everything is fine, right? Wrong, if you reopen the rule in the MMC UI you will notice that the Publisher string is already truncated. As the export simply takes what is there, the result is an incorrect publisher string in the export as well.

Even Microsoft was surprised when we brought up this topic to them.

Pretty simple: Export the rule and update the exported XML to include the full Publisher String. Inject the modified XML into Endpoint Manager and deploy it. To verify if the Publisher Condition is configured correctly, run the following PowerShell cmdlet on the user’s PC.

You should see the correct Publisher condition on the Client PC which matches exactly the publisher’s name on the installed packaged.

Remember however that you will need to update the exported XML whenever you modify the rule or create a new export at a later stage, as Publisher will still only have the truncated Publisher String.

Trusting the UI cost hours – even for Microsoft. Next time, question everything, document the weird, and remember: “Wildcards might save the day, but understanding the details saves your sanity.”

If 2025 had a winning personality, it wouldn’t be the loudest person in the room.
It would be the one who stayed a little longer. Asked better questions.
Listened carefully. And quietly changed things in ways that brought people together.

For us, 2025 wasn’t just about milestones or metrics. It was about movement.
Forward, sideways, sometimes backwards – but always together.

We launched ideas that started as half-sentences.
We turned challenges into conversations.
We learned that progress doesn’t always look like speed – sometimes it looks like clarity.

To our clients and partners:
Thank you for trusting us with your problems, your ambitions, and occasionally your beautifully incomplete support tickets. Thank you for choosing collaboration over convenience, depth over shortcuts, and long-term thinking over quick wins. Thank you for choosing us.

To our team:
Thank you for showing up – not just with skills – but with personality: curiosity, courage, and care. For asking “why” one more time. For challenging each other respectfully. For proving, again and again, that great work is never just about talent – it’s about mindset and how we work together.

And to everyone who followed, supported, recommended, questioned, or quietly believed in us: You were part of our 2025, whether you know it or not.

⸻

Looking Ahead to 2026

We’re entering 2026 with fewer buzzwords and more conviction.
With sharper focus, stronger foundations, and an even clearer sense of what we stand for – and what we don’t.

2026 won’t be about doing more.
It will be about doing what matters – better.

More meaningful relationships.
More honest conversations.
More work we’re proud to put our name on.

We don’t know exactly what 2026 will bring. But we do know how we’ll meet it:
With openness. With ambition. And with the belief that sustainable growth is never built alone.

So here’s to the next chapter.
To ideas worth pursuing.
To progress worth the effort.
And to growing – together.

Thank you, 2025.
We’re ready, 2026.

⸻

Wherever and however you celebrate, we wish you a restful festive season and a healthy, successful year ahead – together.

HCL kicked things off with a webcast about what’s coming on Thursday, November 20, 2025. You can now watch this webcast on YouTube.

There’s lots of news! Of course, there’s a new version of HCL Domino, as well as updated versions of HCL Sametime and HCL Traveler. But today, I want to focus on the HCL Notes client.

Notes 14.5.1 provides the following general enhancements:

Enhanced installation process for the Notes and all client kits on Windows
The Notes installation program now installs deployed modules and places them in the file system, similar to the fast and robust installation methods already in use for the Mac client.

Updated the default font
Enhanced the design by updating the default font to Inter font. This font is recognized in the industry for its clarity and modern aesthetic, contributing to a more polished and professional look.

Notes 14.5.1 provides the following user interface enhancements:

Enhanced the user interface framework
Improvements include: The colors of the tabs have been refined to achieve a more cohesive visual presentation.
The Open menu is now docked by default, making its navigation icons readily available.
The focus color on the navigator has been updated to enhance visibility.
The color of the action bar has been revised to elevate the overall visually appeal.

Enhanced the Properties panel
The Properties panel offers a modern interface within the side shelf, allowing for user-friendly navigation. You can choose to open it in a new window for increased flexibility. Additionally, it supports round-trip editing. When you’re finished, the panel can easily be closed to free up your area.

If Designer is installed, old Properties panel will be shown in Notes and Designer. Contact you administrator to turn off this new properties panel in the Notes ini: DISABLE_ENCHANTED_INFOBOX=1.

Enhanced forms
The user interface of Notes Mail, Calendar, Contact, Notebooks and To Do forms are more visually appealing and user-friendly experiences.

Enhanced dialog boxes
The following dialog boxes are updated: Quick find, Create folder, Move folder, Login, Add calendar, Sametime, Alarms panel and Replication schedule dialog box.

Updated Controls
The following controls are updated: radio box, check box, time-zone control, date picker, list box, picker fields, text field delimiters and tabbed table.

Restyled templates
The following popular templates have been given a new look and feel.

Notes Log
Directory
Directory Catalog
Widget Catalog
Monitoring Configuration
Subscriptions
IdP Catalog
Cluster Analysis

Others: The color orange is used in templates for Notes, while blue is used in those for the Administrator client.

Notes 14.5.1 provides the following calendar improvement

Calendar view improvements

Designated colors and icons for various calendar types, providing clarity and enhancing the visual organization of scheduling tools.

The color scheme of the action bar has been updated.

Notes 14.5.1 provides the following Workspace improvement:

The workspace has been enhanced with a set of new icons that maintain a consistent size by default. Additionally, the interface layout has seen significant improvements, and a new feature allows users to enlarge the previous workspace icons for better visibility and usability. See Preferences – Quick reference

Notes 14.5.1 provides the following Sametime web chat enhancement:

Sametime web chat is integrated with HCL Notes, now offering a modern chat experience that supports read receipts and chat reactions, as well as search chat messages and a new preference to switch back to the older chat experience within the chat window. See How do I set up integrated web chat or change chat settings?

Note: Windows Sametime server 12.0.4 (provided on My HCLSoftware Portal with Domino 14.5.1 EA1) is required to support this feature. To install the new 12.0.4 server, administrators can follow the steps in Installing Sametime Chat on Windows in the Sametime 12.0.3 documentation.

As usual, HCL makes new versions available on its download portal. If you look under “HCL Domino” there, you will be directed to the “Domino Early Access Program.”
(Direct link)

An overview of the release notes

System requirements
System requirements are available on the HCLSoftware Support site:

Performance is something we at panagenda have always been concerned with. And I would say we are good at making the Notes client fast. With this release of Notes 14.5.1, the installer only takes 38 seconds to install in my environment. That’s mind-blowing compared to older client versions.

Early Access Forum

As always, your input and feedback are crucial to HCL. Let them know what you think about the product and new features by submitting your feedback in their HCL Domino 14.5.1 Early Access Discussion Forum. If you participated in a previous Domino Beta or Early Access Program, you can continue to use that account and no sign-up is required.

We were also excited to test the new Notes Client in conjunction with the MarvelClient upgrade.

I can announce, we support HCL Notes 2026 with MCUpgrade. Try it out! (> MCU 14.5.x)

HCL is setting a strong pace with the launch of the new Early Access phase for HCL Notes and HCL Domino 2026. With a more modern user interface, streamlined installation, upgraded templates, and meaningful improvements across the Notes client, this release already feels like a confident step toward the future of the platform. The combination of visual refinements and practical usability enhancements shows that HCL is listening closely to community feedback—and acting on it.

For us at panagenda, performance has always been a core focus, so seeing the Notes client install in just 38 seconds was a standout moment. And with MarvelClient Upgrade already supporting HCL Notes 2026, organizations can start testing without hesitation.

As always, the Early Access Program is only as strong as the feedback it receives. If you work with Notes and Domino, now is the perfect time to explore what’s new, share your thoughts, and help shape the final release.

I’m excited to see where HCL takes us from here 2026 is already off to a promising start.

We are currently seeing the EA1 release. There are usually three EA versions before a final release is available. Things are progressing rapidly. Take advantage of this opportunity to find out more at an early stage and provide feedback.