Friday, August 19, 2011

Fud Buster Friday #64: Quickr is Dead?

 At The View conference, I explained to the room full of Quickr Admins that Quickr is live and well and IBM has plans for the future.

This is from what I saw and heard at Lotusphere 2011.

While the arguments about Quickr J2EE for Websphere Portal range from "why isn't it part of IBM Connections", not that Quickr for Domino is part of it, to "who uses Quickr?"

Here are some Quickr customer references in case you were wondering who uses it.

The truth is Quickr serves purposes within the IBM portfolio that are very useful to many organizations.

Maybe you have a sales organization that needs to stay on top of the latest info, pricing, competitive info. Or perhaps you want to share information with an external source or client.

In these cases, Connections does provide an increasingly more productive way to accomplish these tasks. So it is easy to see why some IBM competitors say Quickr is dead. But again, the truth is far from this.

Project based efforts, client engagements and more, require more depth than what is currently in Connections, the type of depth and details are what make Quickr so useful.

At this junction, IBM sales is quite regularly selling Quickr coupled with Connections to provide a full collaborative solution to cover both the project needs such as multiple levels of files and more granular security in addition to being able to easily create blogs, wikis and share the information outside your organization.

Quickr is not only about file sharing, as many people think. This misnomer comes from competitors who wish to pigeon hole it as a limited product to compare to their own limitations. Quickr has check in and check out benefits as well as a deep directory structure for files.

If your company is looking at a workflow process for your projects or business deals, then Quickr meets that requirement too over Connections.

Quickr provides an integrated calendar sharing for the sites and your projects. Sites are what one may think of as a group or project. There are also Lists, multiple place templates, custom document types too.


Need Quickr on the run? There are mobile options for phones and iPhones and iPads.

Naturally Quickr integrates very well with your existing Lotus Notes and Domino environments, Sametime too, from attachments stored directly inside a Quickr site from any email sent to dragging and dropping emails into sites to keep all information in one place.

Quickr, as well as Connections, integrate into your existing environment of Office and with Outlook as well.  From this wiki page for Connections 3.x:
Install the SharePoint widget and make it available to community owners. A community owner can then add the widget to a community so that community members can view and edit files uploaded from a SharePoint server.
Quickr relies on its Connectors to provide integration. This reference about the Connectors elaborates:

Using the place connector for Microsoft Office, users can exploit the updated Lotus Quickr Ribbon Tab Add-in for Microsoft Office 2007 if they use the Add-in tab. All activities that users can perform from this connector are available on the Places tab in the Office ribbon, which appears next to the Add-In tab. The Ribbon is an enhancement of the previous toolbar and menu options that were available for earlier versions of Microsoft Office as well as previous versions of the connectors installed in Microsoft Office 2007.  The toolbar also exists for versions of Microsoft Office prior to 2007.

But enough about the integration, that was not really the reason for this post, although the truth should be seen and heard, or better yet experienced.

While IBM does not expect to ship any major products this year, pending the arrival of the Vulcan efforts, it does not mean they have not been extending the product lines with point releases and other updates like support for 64-bit which came out in June. Luis Benitez, Quickr for Domino Product Manager just last week posted an update on Quickr and Connection integration.

The ease of use and installation, out of the box, for Quickr for Domino , slightly more effort for clustering, also helps provide a quick ROI. Quickr J2EE can also be used out of the box, runs on Websphere and can likewise be up and running, again with slightly more effort for Clustering.

Based on my session at The View for Quickr admins, I had a good percentage of the show attendees in my session which is a great showing to me that Quickr has not gone away, a number of people had just put it in and were getting trained on it even. So it is far from dead.

The book I co-authored, which is on the top right side of my blog, was written knowing there is a growing interest in the product again.

IBM has the numbers and while I can only guess at them, I do not believe it is dying, in fact, because of Connections, Quickr is growing. Why? Because together the two products complement each other. By providing project efforts, coupled with external and internal collaboration, and without ANY programming involved, you can extend your business and learn more about your own employees. Enable them to easily blog, post to wiki's, share files, secure project data and receive proactive notifications of all of the activity, as much or as little as required.

That is true collaboration.

7 comments:

  1. Quickr is not compatible with 8.5.2 yet. The efforts continue but it increases yells around "Quickr is dead" thing.

    It's a niche product and there is a lack of community resources around its customisation and extension. I spent hours and days to accomplish simple things. We are so close to quit Quickr in our LUG site.

    I, personally wait for a more usable API (even better if integrated with XPages) for Quickr.

    It's not from administration point of view. The deficiency is weighted on development and customization parts.

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  2. Serdar, I doubt highly that a lack of being on 8.5.2 is what prompts this line of thought. Heck what software anywhere runs across everything exactly level? OCS? Exchange? SP? Nope, you MUST upgrade EVERYTHING or it won't work, at least we have flexibility.
    Agreed there are issues on dev side but you know Luis and I am sure he welcomes your discussions on this.

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  3. @serdar, my team is actively working on updating the Domino support. Unfortunately, the Domino team made some changes to some of the APIs that Quickr uses which means that we have to change core elements of our code and re-test everything to make sure we are not introducing regressions. At this point, I've asked my team to skip support for Domino 8.5.2 and go straight to Domino 8.5.3 which I believe is due out anytime soon (I don't want to ship support for Domino 8.5.2 and then 2 weeks later have Domino 8.5.3 ship and then get asked why Quickr doesn't run on that :) ).

    Feel free to reach out to me if you need more info.

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  4. Serdar, I can't relate the two issues: "Domino compatibility" and "development". I agree with Keith that there is a flexibility when upgrading.

    Regarding development and community, then one of the things I like is the community. There are many many partners out there creating great solutions for Quickr. Granted that its not easy to get a grasp of things and it takes some time to get familiar with the dev method, but its absolutely dueable.

    If you need something special for your LUG site, then why not ask a partner for donating stuff in exchange for a logo.

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  5. Sorry for the lag...

    First, I have been misunderstood about something.

    I meant that incompatibility between QuickrD and latest release of Domino affected the perception of the product's continuation, in addition to the dereleasing of Entry edition.

    @Keith, I don't see this as a flexibility. But I get your point. You are evaluating Quickr as a standalone product talking other software. Looking from this perspective, it's OK.

    @Luis, I am with you. Releasing 8.5.2 support does not make sense one month before 8.5.3. I wish it didn't happen so, but I totally trust your judgement. Waiting for the good news about new release. I will contact you...

    @Jan, I didn't related those issues. But these are adding up and altering the 'perception' about the product. Keith blogged a wrong perception of 'Quickr is Dead' issue and I commented my concerns on why it may be so.

    Regarding the community, with all my respect, I am a part of the community 'contributing into Quickr content'. You can see my blog. I spent lots of time for Quickr customization (not billing time, completely LUG time :) ). I am sure the advanced development can be learnt. However lack of resources is a fact.

    About LUG site, it didn't happen so far. Nobody (partner or else) asked for help about it. In the Turkish market, partners' approach is different (long story). There are people from LUGTR asking help but they don't know Quickr. That's why we may switch to XPages soon.

    Sorry for the long answer.

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  6. On Lotusphere 2012 Lialis will be there with a Quickr iPad solution, with which it is possible to download, upload and synchronize Quickr files directly to your iPad, iPhone or Blackberry. Managers run from meeting to meeting, with their iPad they are now able to access up-to-date information.

    There is much interest for this product which proofs to me that Quickr is not dead, people just mis some functionalities.

    Check it out for yourself, there is a free download for one person: http://www.lialis.com/lotussolutionprovider.nsf/pages/quickrwebdav

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  7. Lialis, We look forward to seeing it in action. Not everyone is Apple ready though.
    Yes, Quickr is alive and well contrary to what the competition says.

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