Archive for the 'Lotus Quickr' Category

What would you do, if you were in charge of Lotus?

Published on September 15, 2008 in IBM, Lotus, Lotus Connections, Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr and Lotus Traveler by Alexander Kluge. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Today I had the time to read all the comments to last weeks posts about Lotus Notes‘ core strengths and weaknesses. Finally Volker asked: What would you do, if you were in charge of Lotus?. And Alan Lepofsky, now Director of Marketing at Socialtext, hits the mark:

[…] DRAMATICALLY simplify the product portfolio down to only 3 offerings: Notes/Domino, Sametime, and Connections.

Gone as standalone products would be Quickr, Doc, Workflow, Portal, Forms, Portal, Mash-ups, Traveler, Symphony, and anything else I’ve left off. Not gone as features, just gone as stand alone purchasable units which require marketing, confuse customers and press, etc. Take their code, and weave it appropriately into the 3 products above.

For example, Quickr does two things, file/attachment sharing and team sharing sites. The main confusion over Quickr is Domino or J2EE? Fine, remove any talk about that, by taking the Domino Quickr code and moving it into… Domino. Take the J2EE Quickr code, and make it part of Connections. Don’t talk about parity across the platforms, talk about how Domino now has file sharing and team spaces, and how Connections now has file sharing and team spaces. That is not overlapping product functionality, as both products need those features. […]

-> read on

I know IBM is listening. I hope they will understand.




Filesharing and synchronizing

Published on September 8, 2008 in Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr and Web2.0 by Alexander Kluge. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I am using Foldershare, a peer-to-peer service for synchronizing files, since years. It does a good job for some usecases at the borderline between my private and my professional life. In my professional life I have Lotus Notes and Quickr, we never used Foldershare.

In the last weeks I had some occasional looks to other services providing help in organizing files online. I tested wua.la and ran into several problems. It has a Java client and caused some conflicts on my machine. When it was up and running, wua.la was down for days. OK, its beta, but they should call it alpha at this time. Finally, it did not work from within our corporate network, because it needs specific ports.

Last week I received another invitation for Dropbox. I have been told several times that Dropbox is actualy the best service out there for filesharing – and indeed: it is well designed, works without any problem, everywhere, on Mac, Win and Linux. From my first tests I can say: I like it.

If anyone needs an invitation code for Dropbox, just leave a comment.

Cool Tools

Published on Januar 22, 2007 in Lotus Connections, Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr, Lotusphere2007 and Sametime by Alexander Kluge. 0 Comments

Lotusphere Opening Session is over, the Eagle has landed. Time to review the announcements.

So it´s all about collaboration. It´s about connecting people and knowledge. Bringing together teams to work efficiently on projects. Help people becoming more productive, fighting the email flood and finding their ways throught the information djungel. Nothing realy new to the Lotus community. That is what this community has done for years. But now collaboration seems to be recognized by CEOs as the big challenge. And collaboration finds its way up from all these succesfull web 2.0 projects to the IBM product portfolio.

So what have we seen today?

  • Sametime 7.5 seems to be very successfull. IBM sold over 1 Million seats of Lotus Sametime. Many partners contribute plugins to the new Eclipse based clients. Furture Direction: With video chat support, tabbed chat, voice and telephony integration Lotus Sametime will become THE Unified Messaging tool for corporate usage.
  • Hannover is Lotus Notes 8 now. Public Beta will be available next month. Some partners like our company is part of the Managed Beta program. And what I can say: This Beta version is extremly robust and easy to work with. We saw some features I did not know about like ghosted calendar entries or the integrated PDF converter for documents.
  • Lotus Quickr is a Web 2.0 like collaborative content server. It looked like a mesh-up of Workplace Documents, QuickPlace and some Blog and Wiki solutions.
  • Lotus Quickr Personal Edition supports Document Management functionality within the Windows Explorer, Lotus Sametime Client and Lotus Notes 8 Client with MS Office integration. They said nothing about Open Office integration, but this should not be a big deal. Cool feature: Drag´n´Drop of documents between Quickr and Notes Mail plugin in the new Lotus Notes 8 client. And the best thing: It comes for free to all Lotus Notes users. Lotus Quickr will make the daily work with documents much more easier within the collaborative environment of Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime. And it shares information with the standards like RSS and Atom support.
  • Lotus Quickr Standard Edition adds Teamspaces, Blogs and Wikis. And it comes with lots of templates. So you can start with a project management teamroom right away. The Standard Edition will be for free for owners of a Quickplace license. Interesting: Quickr apps will be available offline by NSF support. So it replicates. There is a Java based local store too and connectors to Filenet.
  • With Lotus Connections IBM finally makes the Activity server available. The call it the „First Ready-for-Business Social Software“. And this is something I waited for since a long time. The activity centric appoach to collaboration was integrated in several products like the old Workplace Managed Client, and last years Lotusphere visitors could see very cool code in the labs running on top of a simple Tomcat server. IBM now delivers the Activity toolset including a bookmark server á la del.icio.us, a powerfull profiling engine and social community support. Of course it integrates into Eclipse based Sametime client as well as in the new Lotus Notes 8 client. Last year they showed a Lotus Notes 6.x and higher integration for the Activity server, but today I have not heard anything about the support of older versions.
    Lotus Connections will be be available to Lotusphere Online users this afternoon. I am very curious how it works.

IBM promises to build cool tools. Why cool? Because cool tools will be pulled into organizations, you don´t have to push it. Just like Instant Messaging made its way to the corporate world, because it was cool and people wanted to use it. IBM speaks about „viral adoption“. And from what I have seen, there is a good chance for things like Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections to be adopted exactly this way. These solutions realy look cool.