Rob Novak: 14 reasons you will upgrade to IBM Lotus Quickr 8 - and they’re all free

April 1 2007

No April Fool's...Rob Novak announces an exciting component of Lotus Quickr 8 on his blog:

IBM has contracted with Design Partner SNAPPS to accelerate the development of eleven new templates ("placetypes" in Lotus Quickr terms) that will be available free to licensed Lotus Quickr users.  Each of them has a different purpose, is being designed with modularity in mind, and makes use of the latest in Web 2.0 technologies.  In addition, IBM has acquired the rights to incorporate SNAPPS' open-source templates developed a few months ago for QuickPlace 7 into Lotus Quickr 8.  So out of the box, you will see IBM Lotus Quickr versions of QDoc, QBlog, and QWiki. ...

The eleven new templates will be distributed by both IBM and SNAPPS as open-source and free under the Apache open source license, version 2.0.  They encompass a variety of functions you might want to perform with web-based team collaboration:
  • Project Management
  • Ideas and Innovation
  • Image Repository
  • Meeting and Agenda Management
  • Activities Integration
  • Contact Management
  • Dynamic Surveys
  • Corporate Communications Management
  • Collaborative Presentation Development
  • Issues Escalation, Workflow and Management
  • J2EE Document Library Integration
Very exciting news for the Quickr team -- only adding to the great story being put together around this upcoming release.
Links:
Rob Novak: 14 reasons you will upgrade to IBM Lotus Quickr 8 - and they're all free >
Podcast with Rob Novak on ibm.com covering this announcement:  podcast >  transcript >
The QuickrBlog: IBM publishes Quickr podcast featuring Rob Novak >
Viktor Krantz's new ekrantz.com > (Viktor is part of the SNAPPS team as well)

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [17]

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  1. 1  mark hughes  | 4/1/2007 7:25:42 PM

    Will there be a quikr express?

  1. 2  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 4/1/2007 7:45:14 PM

    I don't know of any plans for one at the moment. What would you be looking for in an Express offering versus the regular Quickr Standard?

  1. 3  Phil West  | 4/1/2007 9:52:12 PM

    it sounds a bit like what we were all discussing a while ago: assorted templates that we can use out-of-the-box. Excellent news even if there is an extra layer to get to them. :-)

  1. 4  Ralf M Petter  | 4/2/2007 12:26:56 AM

    So i think the question is will this new templates work on Quickr Standard?

  1. 5  Vitor Pereira http://www.vitor-pereira.com | 4/2/2007 4:35:07 AM

    @4 Ralf, I think you mean Quickr personal, right?

  1. 6  Ralf M Petter  | 4/2/2007 6:46:28 AM

    @5 Yes thanks for the correction.

  1. 7  David Price  | 4/2/2007 8:07:54 AM

    This is great news for QuickPlace/Quikr customers and it is impressive work by an impressive business partner.

    At the risk of repeating previous threads, having templates or Placetypes that highlight the power and functionality of the Lotus portfolio brings value to everyone. The more functionality my customers have out of the box the better.

  1. 8  Kurt B http://www.onthehoist.com | 4/2/2007 9:44:19 AM

    This is great. As a QP customer since v 1.0 we're really looking forward to the new version.

  1. 9  Rob Novak http://www.LotusRockStar.com | 4/2/2007 9:59:18 AM

    @Ralf, not a design goal right now to make them work with Quickr personal. It's not the right context as Quickr personal is about storing, tagging and sharing your own documents, and not about business processes. That said, I don't even know if they will work as the personal edition is due later in the year and I haven't seen the architecture yet.

    @David, blush.

    @Phil, yes the extra layer is there - you'll download from IBM or SNAPPS. Not enough time to get them into the release like QDoc, QWiki and QBlog.

    @Anthony, too early for screenshots, we just started! But keep checking as I will be loading shots and movies and explanations all of Q2.

  1. 10  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 4/2/2007 10:20:15 AM

    @Rob - Absolutely brilliant work. :-) Now if only I could figure out why I would want to use Quickr instead of native Domino apps...

  1. 11  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 4/2/2007 2:16:28 PM

    @11 - BZZT Charles. :-) Quickr IS a native Domino app. 100% on the Domino platform. No WAS/DB2/J2EE required.

    So now you're out of excuses. ;-)

  1. 12  Peter Smith  | 4/2/2007 2:24:02 PM

    @12 From Lotusphere I understood there were going to be two releases of Quickr, one for Domino and one for WAS/J2EE.

    Is that still the case (or was it ever, my 'sphere memory is pretty blurred) and if so will there be any functionality differences between the two?

  1. 13  Rob Novak http://www.LotusRockStar.com | 4/2/2007 4:17:02 PM

    @Charles: Anything I say about that can be countered with "I can do that in Domino"...business users doing security, membership management, round-trip editing, etc. But you always have to ask why you would spend the time and money when Quickr/QP lets you start with a platform where all of these Domino-enabled, Quickr-enhanced services and features are already coded out...

    We USED to say the same about WebSphere Portal...I can do that (and did at Lotusphere 02 and 03) but no way would I today.

    @Nathan & Peter, yes there is a J2EE side to Lotus Quickr 8 that delivers enhancements on what used to be Team Spaces in WCS, Portal Document Manager, Workplace Documents. You get one license and can deploy Quickr as you like in any combination - Domino platform only, J2EE platform only (you wouldn't do that if you have QuickPlace already), or both. QP users can benefit from deploying robust J2EE doc management without incurring separate license costs (caveat: not IBMer).

    Functionally they are striving for parity but realistically there will be differences due to the platforms and heritage of each component. But they will interact and play together. Programmatically they are different models.

  1. 14  David Bell  | 4/2/2007 5:59:10 PM

    @11 - Charles, do you ever eat out ?

    I mean, you have all the tools in the kitchen at your disposal and you can get the raw ingredients, so you could make anything you can buy in a restaurant at home.

    Why would you bother going out ?

    Just because you could do it, given enough time and money, does not mean you always should.

    I've seen customers get sticker shock at the price of software licenses, then spend 2 or 3 yrs and several orders of magnitude more money creating their own version. Makes no business sense.

  1. 15  emma  | 4/2/2007 7:42:58 PM

    Bloody fantastic! I'm just starting to experiment with how this functionality could be used in a business context using other free open source software. So by the time we get Quickr, we should know how we want to use these things.

  1. 16  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 4/3/2007 8:48:38 AM

    @14 - Perhaps I need to be less cryptic in my comments. What I was getting at is the dearth of information on what Quickr is and how it integrates with Notes and Domino. :-) I get that it's the next generation of Quickplace, but I honestly never really "got" Quickplace, either. That's probably just me being hard-headed, though.

    @15 - Actually I don't eat out much precisely because I can cook just about anything and I enjoy it immensely. :-P I get what you're saying, though, it's about the convenience.

  1. 17  Rob Novak http://www.LotusRockStar.com | 4/4/2007 11:04:59 PM

    Just FYI I just recorded a podcast with Bruce Elgort giving a little more insight into the 11 new templates.

    { Link }