IBM team collaboration software - Lotus Quickr
I followed the news at Lotuphere and then followed the blogs. All of this “following” lead me to the IBM site for the official posting / announcement …
IBM Lotus Quickr will provide ready-to-use team places where team members — inside or outside the firewall — can share information and collaborate on projects online.
Lotus Quickr comes with Quickr connectors that integrate into your familiar desktop applications so you can “work the way you want to work.”What’s more, Quickr connectors work with current versions of these applications — avoiding costly desktop upgrades and freeing your valuable IT resources for more important work.
Lotus Quickr is designed to empower grassroots, bottoms-up adoption by letting users invite and encourage others to participate and to bring about change in the way the organization manages information and works together.
Shared content libraries
Quickly set up libraries to organize and share content. Users can access content in Lotus Quickr right from their familiar Microsoft Windows desktop. They simply drag documents from their C-drive folders to personal or shared Lotus Quickr places. Or, they can save documents to Lotus Quickr folders directly from the application they are using.
Source: IBM team collaboration software - Lotus Quickr
Now, I am a long long time user of Lotus software (can you say Notes 1.2 ?). However, I was never a big user of Quickplace. It was too slow - which may be as much about my server and my ability to tune software as anything else so I’m not casting blame.
For those reading this, you also know I am a new blogger. It took me all of about 5 minutes to get WordPress installed with my hosted service. It took me about 2 days worth of playing around to get a look-n-feel that I am happy with and I’ll admit I still have a few invisible issues to iron out. But the whole idea of blogging is becoming more clear to me.
Blogging is not just a place to share photos of the kids and tell about your recent vacation (and trust me, you don’t want that type of blog from me - BORRING). Blogging can be a great source of information. Some blogs are “hints and tips; other blogs are training information; my blog tends to be open ended issues I want to “get out there” for brain storming and reaction.
The software for this form of content sharing is broad and deep - content publishing, file servers, and document management all share aspects of what I am describing. When you build and end-to-end solution, you not only have the service end of things, but also the user experience. That UI serves as both the input and output of the solution.
What has made blogging so interesting is the easy of both in the input and output processes. At the lowest common denominator, all you need is a web browser at the user end of things. As for the service, it has become as simple as paying an Internet hosting service $8/month and you’ve got a full web site with blogging , on-line databases, storage, access control and more.
Now, IBM Lotus is introducing Quickr. I have no hands-on experience with it and my imagination is running wild with ideas of what I will find when I finally “open the box”. I am *so* looking forward to getting Quickr installed ! I want to see the connectors in action and see how I can integrate Quickr with established sources of content.
I’ll be interested in the “software as service” capabilities of Quickr. Blogs have value both as an open and public content expository (my word) as well as a corporate tool (staying well protected behind corporate firewalls. I anticipate lots of companies will explore the latter so I will take some time to look as the hosting service side of things.
… this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship …
