Uploading Files to Quickr from a Mac Notes Client

This post comes from a discussion I had with someone around a lack of MAC Quickr connectors.

Mac Guidera has responsibility for the Connectors and last year at Lotusphere the question was asked about MAC connectors among others. The answer is we don't have any as far as I know.

SNAPPS has a product called Panda Bear which helps this problem. But what if you wanted something inside your MAC Notes client?

After the excellent session today by Mat Newman the idea came to me and while it may not work, I had a theory which I will explain how to bring some hope to the MAC people.

Sidebar. Yes that thing so many people never use or think about has some excellent options inside it. One is to provide a feed, link, notes db, view, URL etc.. as a Sidebar application.

I don't have a MAC so I will describe the idea and maybe someone can try it and let me know if it works.

Take the URL of the Quickr place, say the file area of a Place and make that a Sidebar app. There is a java section on the page and I wondered if you could then drag and drop your files into the place.

Sounds simple enough but some problems could exist.
1) Maybe drag and drop on a MAC is not enough to add the file. Perhaps it would prompt you with the save dialog?
2) If drag and drop doesn't work. If the main Files page was in the Sidebar, is it asking a user too much to click on the add a file option? Could it be this easy?
3) Maybe there is code preventing this from happenning in some way?
4) How would you do this if you had dozens of Places? There is no good way to import/export the places like there is for the Windows Connector. So this may not be perfectly practical in all situations.

There it is, not a great option, but possibly one that has merit in some cases.

Lotusphere inspires ideas and if this works, maybe for some people it would mean a lot.

SnTT - IBM Lotus Quickr Connectors in 8.5.x can act like 8.2

A few days ago I was with a client and we were going over how their files will look in Quickr 8.5.1.

Using the Quickr Connectors I noticed something which was not how my laptop was working with them.

If he double clicked on a file in the explorer list, it did not open the file...but opened the Quickr site and the file page. If he then wanted to view or edit it he had to right click or click on the drop down or the item and then preview to see it.

My laptop just opened the file.

I realized my Connectors had not been updated. So I updated them.

And they did it too!

As Darren Duke and I discussed via Skype, this is working as designed. Some have said this only happens in specific cases. And so it seems, this is that case.

What normally should happen is one should see this screen:

Ok, fine. But I, and my client, are not seeing it and want the old way back.
In this case rebuilding 1,000's of documents was not feasible.

I searched and did not find anything about this.

I did find someone inside IBM on the Connector team who emailed me back a solution, which works for me, but no guarantee it will work in all cases. YMMV

The behavior was changed to allow for the connectors to add/edit custom metadata to documents. By doing this, we needed a method to allow management of attachments on a document type page.

One thing you can try, is to modify the server version in the registry ON YOUR PC(my addition). The old behavior is in the code, but we get the server version from the registry when you manage places ... and we update it accordingly. What you you can try is to change the following key:

in the registry ...
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\IBM\Lotus Quickr\Desktop Integration\Servers\
and change the Version to 8.0.4

The flag for the code is for server API version 8.0.5 or greater ...
No guarantees this will work and it can change back when you manage places on that server ... and you lose some of the new features (such as required metadata prompting).

So it worked for me and hopefully for you as well. No idea if it will revert back or not after a day or 2 or reboot or next time I login but so far today it's worked as expected.

EDITED with an update 1/7 Noon: It seems that if you add a place it reverts back. Still testing if I don't add a place what happens. So this may or not really work in the end. Perhaps just installing a Connector from 8.2 is best?