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.