Someone on Twitter posed an excellent question today, when should one use Quickr or Connections. This is not the first, or last time someone posts on this topic, so do your research too, or contact me. This is meant to be seen as a basic overview.
There are numerous answers to this and the fact that someone asked implies IBM and we Business Partners have not done a great job of explaining the difference. Most likely I will not do it service, and some will have better answers than I and if so, please comment.
While there is overlap between parts of Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections there are also some fundamental differences about them.
Quickr, for example comes in a Domino format and a Websphere J2EE format.
Connections on the other hand ONLY comes in a Websphere J2EE format. Previously I used the term Mostly because Domino could be running the mail side.
Both come ready to work on multiple Operating systems.
Quickr is more likely to be used by a group or project of people within an organization, sometimes with external users. Their needs revolve around secure file sharing, some workflow perhaps, management of details and deadlines and of course the ability to let others know when something has been posted or changed with an alert via email. Security is the primary benefit, sharing of data and being selective about who can see or edit that data is of importance.This is like having your typical silo business unit where what goes inside it, stays inside it.
Connections is more about the individual, but within the enterprise as the whole, profiles are important, sharing of documents or grouping them and making them freely accessible is a by product, creating communities that will thrive about a product or idea that are more social and open by nature, although still within a secure and security minded infrastructure. Connections can maintain one's personal contacts list as well as some more details on people than usually found in most PIM solutions. This is like taking your typical silo of a business unit(or in my language a Microsoft thinking business) and letting it share its knowledge and experience across the platform for everyone.
There are overlaps, both:
- Handle file sharing, but in different secure ways
- Provide RSS feeds for their places or data to be viewed
- Allow for external users to gain access to data files through invitations
- Provide for Single Sign On integration
- Provide security levels as to be expected
- Have Blog and Wiki options
- Provide for some form of management of activities and items to be done for projects
- Integrate with Lotus Notes, Symphony and Sametime
It is not my intention to provide a full detail explanation of each product, for that you could go their respective websites,
Quickr and
Connections for more details.
There is a pdf you may wish to review that outlines some guidelines of roles that would suit each of them best, and includes Lotus Sametime as well. You can find it here.
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/stwiki.nsf/0/00FE2842583EB37C8525757F0049A069/$FILE/Experience%20Lotus5.pdfOne can also find a rather longer pdf from the R8 Quickr time frame about Quickr
here.
