What is IBM Lotus Quickr?

Lotus Quickr is a Web 2.0-based team collaboration offering designed to transform the way everyday business content such as documents and rich media can be shared and to enable more effective team collaboration across organizational boundaries.  Our goal is to make it faster and easier for people to share content of all types (not just documents) with their various virtual teams.  Lotus Quickr is designed to make it easier to collaborate without barriers – across organizational boundaries, outside the organization, and without worrying about application stove pipes.

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Lotus Quickr features

We’ll provide a more comprehensive list of features, possibly in the format of a reviewers guide, sometime before general availability of the product. At a high level, this is how you can think of the capabilities of Lotus Quickr:

Shared content libraries are the most basic type of personal or team workspace.  They provide a streamlined personal or team place that uses only content components.  Capabilities include:  check in & out, version control, library management, views, security, custom meta-data for a variety of business content types.

Team places are self-service, customizable team sites with an extensible infrastructure (membership mgmt, search capabilities), that support a full team lifecycle.   They build on the shared content library (since content is one of the fundamental things that teams share) with the addition of other capabilities.

Wikis and team blogs are examples of the reusable collaborative components (libraries, calendars, tasks, blogs, lists, Web content authoring...) available in Lotus Quickr that enable end users to build powerful team workspaces and customized team applications.

Basic workflow and project management are also collaborative capabilities that are available in Lotus Quickr.  For example, users can create basic workflow to manage the approval and publishing of content (in a shared content library or team workspace).  Basic project management components, such as a team calendar, tasks lists, milestones, and discussions, can be included in any Lotus Quickr team place.  Lotus Quickr also includes a more comprehensive project management template that users can populate for specific projects.

Business Application templates provide immediate out-of-the-box value and support of common business processes.  Lotus Quickr includes business templates, such as an “Innovation Place” for brainstorming on ideas and capturing best practices, project management, and more…  All templates are customizable.  Business users can easily change the look and feel (like changing the color scheme), and they can add pre-built components, such as a team blog, a project calendar, or an announcement page.  We’re also working to build a Lotus Quickr community on the Web, where Lotus, our partners, and our customers can contribute more advanced templates.

Anytime, anywhere means that Lotus Quickr includes the capability to take your content offline and to collaborate with people inside and outside your firewall using Quickr team places.  It also means that you can use Lotus Quickr connectors right from the applications that you use every day instead of always having to switch to a different application. 

Lotus Quickr connectors

Lotus Quickr connectors are one of the most important and unique aspects of Lotus Quickr.   They bring Lotus Quickr capabilities right into the applications that people use everyday – Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Office, Windows Explorer, IBM Productivity Editors.  A key benefit is they enable users to collaborate right from within the applications where they work everyday, helping to alleviate that fragmented “stove pipe” feeling we all experience. Here are some examples to help explain the connectors:

• In the Lotus Notes connector, with a couple clicks, I can detach an attachment from an e-mail into a personal or team place on a Lotus Quickr server.   I get a little window right in my Notes client where I can navigate through my Lotus Quickr places, find the target location (e.g. a folder), and then click to detach.  It’s very similar to detaching something to a folder on my C-drive.
• In the connector for Lotus Sametime 7.5, I have a “shelf” in my Lotus Sametime client that let’s me navigate through my Lotus Quickr places.  I can open a document… or I can drag a document link into a chat.
• In Windows Explorer or “My Documents,” I can navigate through my Lotus Quickr places.  I can drag and drop content to and from them.
• In Microsoft Office and the IBM Productivity Editors, I can check in / check out or simply open and file documents into my Lotus Quickr places.
  

Content repositories

Repositories are like databases, but they are designed specifically to store and manage documents and a variety of content types.  Initially with Lotus Quickr, we provide two different types of repositories:

1. a Domino-based repository that is the next generation of Lotus QuickPlace and
2. a java content repository (JCR) that is the next generation of the document repository based on Portal technology.

* Customers who purchase IBM Lotus Quickr get access to both. Customers can choose to deploy one or the other, or both.

We will also expand our Lotus Quickr services in the future to work with other repositories.  We’ve already announced that we’ll provide integration with FileNet P8 later in 2007.  We’re working on the details of how we will implement that integration.  Suffice to say that IBM Lotus Quickr repositories combined with FileNet P8 integration delivers the most comprehensive content portfolio for our customers.  That means, for example, that I would be able to detach an e-mail attachment from Lotus Notes directly in the FileNet content store. Next on our list is integration with Microsoft SharePoint. 

Is Lotus Quickr just a fancy new document management system?

Certainly the ability to store, organize, and manage documents is an important part of the capability that Lotus Quickr provides.   But Lotus Quickr provides much more than document management.  First, it is designed to handle content that goes beyond the typical definition of “document” -- rich media content (like podcasts), images, blogs, wikis, etc.   Second, Lotus Quickr provides many capabilities that are focused on team collaboration, not just content collaboration.  These include team calendars, project milestones, discussion forums, etc.  We’re seeing a trend in the marketplace to converge basic document management capabilities with team collaboration.  That matches what we are doing with Lotus Quickr.

Business application templates

Lotus Quickr comes with a rich set of services or components that business users can select and combine when they create a “place.”  A business application template provides a specific type of pre-designed place with a selection of components, behavior (or business logic), and a look and feel.  In other words, instead of starting from a “plain vanilla” template when creating a new “place,” a Lotus Quickr user can start from one of our pre-designed templates.  As an example, we’ve built a business application template called “Innovation Place” that is designed to support brainstorming and evaluating and developing new ideas. We’re working on others, like a project management template and a meeting management template.

We describe Lotus Quickr as “open”

Lotus Quickr supports many industry standards, including Java, AJAX, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), Atom, Eclipse, Open Document Format (ODF), and Linux.  Many Lotus Quickr capabilities are components that can be integrated into composite applications (e.g. in IBM WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes 8, or Lotus Sametime).  Lotus Quickr also supports multiple operating systems on the server, Linux on the desktop, multiple directories, and multiple repositories… all with more to come in the future.  Lotus Quickr is designed to fit into a heterogeneous environment rather than trying to force customers into a homogeneous, vendor-dictated environment.

Are the capabilities exactly the same and independent of the underlying infrastructure?

Our goal is to make the capabilities essentially equivalent so that the choice of an infrastructure (Domino-based services and repository or the WebSphere services / JCR) is mostly based on the architecture and standards of an IT organization – like the decision to deploy on a certain operating system or hardware.  In the first release of Lotus Quickr, there will definitely be differences that will affect a customer’s decision about what to deploy.   At a high level, the availability of team collaboration components (project management, lists, team calendar, etc) will be richer for the Domino-based implementation in the first release because these components come from the QuickPlace heritage.  Seamless portlet integration and rich document meta-tagging will be stronger in the WebSphere /JCR deployment.

We will have that list of differences and a decision tree available closer to when the product becomes generally available.  Remember that the purchase of Lotus Quickr entitles the customer to both repositories.  And many customers (especially our large customers) already have both Domino and Portal infrastructures, so they might be very comfortable deploying both.

Integrate with IBM Lotus Connections

We are providing initial integration with the dogear (book marking capability) in Lotus Connections.  Users can tag their content for dogear right from the Lotus Quickr context menus.  In the future, we see many more natural integration points with Lotus Connections.  For example, the activities capability in Lotus Connection provides an excellent tool for collaborating with a small group of people on a short term task or project.  In our labs we have already begun deeper integration between Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections.

http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product3.nsf/wdocs/quickr