IBM Lotus Quickr 8.1 - Warts 'n' All
Eos has a long history with Lotus and in particular the team-space solution Lotus Quickplace. With the replacement - Lotus Quickr - being available for over a year, we thought we’d take this chance to have a closer "warts ‘n’ all" look at the product and discuss what worked and what didn’t.
To those of us who have not seen or heard the Quickr hype – Quickr is a web-based application that provides team spaces, file sharing, workflow and collaborative functionality.
News - don't miss our new article on Customising IBM Lotus Quickr 8.1
Quickr…is it more than just the latest Quickplace?
In a nutshell…..yes!
The current version of Lotus Quickr has the beautiful, updated Web 2.0 style interface and a maturing development framework. The code behind the application is becoming much cleaner and more understandable, which is leading to a smoother install and configuration.
The introduction of the Blog, Wiki and RSS/Atom Feed plug-in's are an excellent addition, as well as the tighter integration with Lotus Notes and Sametime. Presence awareness is now available and you can also access Quickr from the sidebar in Notes 8. The integration with Microsoft Office is now usable and also integrates well with Microsoft Outlook.
In Quickr 8.1, you now have access to all content via REST services and much better third party support than was previously available.
In the beginning….there was Quickr 8.0.
Bugs, bugs and more bugs.
Unfortunately the first release was a like opening a defective present – and then having to return it to the store.........17 times. Quickr 8.0 had ‘hotfixes’ released every couple of days and the process to implement them was frustrating. After 17 hotfixes there was still no integration with Lotus Notes, no support for Domino 8 servers, Lotus Connector issues and some confusion between the Domino and WebSphere versions of Quickr. The biggest problem of all was the SNAPPS templates breaking after applying a hotfix.
Upgrade to Quickr 8.0.0.2
Fixed heaps of bugs.....introduced a few newies.
During this phase of the Quickr release we saw around 15 hotfixes being sent out and a similar user interface to v8.0. There was still no integration with Lotus Notes Domino 8, however the Lotus Connectors became a lot more stable (after uninstalling, rebooting and reinstalling). We now started to learn the parity between the Domino and WebSphere versions, but unfortunately this release also managed to break all of the SNAPPS templates (doh!).
Drum roll……introducing Quickr 8.1
More bugs fixed…pretty much there.
As of the last few weeks there was still a few hotfixes (upto #13) being pumped out but overall everything seems pretty normal now. Thankfully, we now have the brand new user interface which is much more intuitive and very Web 2.0 (see below).
Quickr now integrates well with Notes 8 and Microsoft Office through the ‘Connectors’ add-on (see below) – which has also become more stable if you uninstall any previous version of it.
We now have full support on Domino 8 servers and the SNAPPS Templates are working well on v8.1.
Quickr 8.1 also offers some new updates including:
- Quickr 8.1 now ships with the Dojo v1.0 toolkit (Dojo is an open source JavaScript framework)
- You can now drag & drop documents to the Java applet (not an ActiveX control)
- Quickr gives programmers “hooks” to link into functions very easily ie. Page Loads, Page Submits.
- AJAX components are available to avoid whole page refreshes
- Placebot’s tapping into JavaScript framework.
Third Party Extensions to Quickr
With the release of every product there should be some nice little add-on’s that come free of charge. With Quickr 8.1, there is a whole bunch of excellent templates that are available free of charge. These templates include:
SNAPPS Templates
A heap of free templates from the IBM sanctioned design partner - SNAPPS.
Opus Neo
An IBM Business Partner offering a couple of free downloads for Quickr & Quickplace.
There are also a few priced additions that are well worth investigating further:
IBM Quickr Content Integrator
This great tool allows you to integrate content and data from ERP, CRM, DBMS and file systems. This includes Oracle, Microsoft SharePoint, SAP etc.
IBM Quickr Library Linker
This is an addition we have been waiting for! This tool basically copies content from one Quickr to another. It allows content interoperations between Lotus Quickr libraries based on Dojo and Lotus Quickr REST services.
More Information on Quickr
Read more about IBM Lotus Quickr. If you would like more information, or would like to arrange a demonstration, please contact us.
