First and foremost, QuickR looks super shiny and glossy. The UI is slick, the tool is very user friendly. Not exactly a business case to implement QuickR, but the reason I mention this is because as an end user myself, this is a tool that I would actually want to use and promote within my team to support collaboration.
Second, and more importantly, what IBM have achieved with QuickR is to make it easy & natural to move content to a collaborative environment, which will support the change in mindset we need to make happen in our environment. Let's face it, today, if an end user has to share any information with his team, he'll send it in an email regardless of how big the information is or what its format is. We all do it. Our user community is used to staying put and ping-ponging their information around which results in large amounts of redundancy of information, version "anxiety", storage problems, da-di-dah. What we really need is for the information to stay put in one place, and for the users to access the information as required. This however will only happen if users are able to find and access whatever information they need readily, quickly and easily - ie more readily, quickly and easily than they can today in their endless stocks of email history.
Getting information in and out of QuickR is where IBM have hit gold. QuickR is accessible via its connectors from the rest of the IBM suite & also from other applications, eg.
# from the sidebar of the Notes client for people to move attachments in and out of their inbox. As soon as the user has dragged an attachment (directly from their email) to the QuickR sidebar, that attachment gets replaced automatically with a link to the uploaded document in the email. Useful eh? Also, when a user is sending out an email, if there is an attachment in the email, Notes will pop up a window to offer them the ability to move that document to QuickR.
# from iNotes (aka DWA, aka web-based Notes). Works in the same way as in the rich client.
# from Sametime. Integration with the Sametime client I found particularly exciting - users can righclick on a document in their QuickR connector in ST, start a multichat with a group of users based on that document and work together on that document real-time, all at the click of a button.
# Lotus Symphony, MS Office, MS Sharepoint, Windows Explorer, MS Outlook and more is on the way.
From the end user's perspective, all QuickR is is another folder which they can share with the people they want. Checking documents in and out of QuickR is very easy for the end user. In fact, the seamlessness with which QuickR integrates with all the other applications from an end user perspective is what I think will sell.
Overall, fantastic product. If money was no object, I would have loved to roll it out to our users next month ; ) ... o and have a medieval castle in the South of France.
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Great post! If money was no object? I am under the distinct impression that we are fully licensed for Quickr. Maybe we can 'persuade' Dai that an upgrade is in order?
We are licenced for QuickR indeed and we could potentially just upgrade the servers, specially given that they are independent of the rest of the Domino infra. We would not have any of the Notes integrated functionality available, but with the Sametime upgrade we could look into the IM integration already.
So for someone who knows Sharepoint better than Quickr, can you tell me what things it does that SP cannot? Most of the functionality you have described we could do with a full Exchange/OCS/SP environment too. I guess my concern is if we have a mixed vendor environment will most of the cool functionality still work or do we get restricted? All helps our business case ;-)
Hmm, how do I edit comments?
I'm not that familiar with Sharepoint but from what I have gleaned, the differences are small and subtle.
The Notes client/iNotes integration is designed to make saving attachments on your web place extremely intuitive, and will basically walk the user through the few steps needed proactively (i.e. the user would need to choose not to save the file to the web place)
There is also integration out of the box for seamlessly moving/publishing content from a personal web place to a team web place, and even to a Web Content Management system with all the control and workflow options that you get with those systems. As far as I know we would need to custom build that integration into Sharepoint today.
The other area that Karoona didn't explicitly cover is the integration with the Connections product, which enables all this content to be linked into the social network. At the time of writing Microsoft do not have a competitive offering for social networking. Knowing our history, we can expect Microsoft to buy one of the vendors that offer add-on social software products for Sharepoint. If we want to stay with a single vendor collaboration environment we have two choices for our social software platform:
(1) Wait (or do tactical) until Microsoft builds/buys and integrates social software into it's product set
(2) Guess which one Microsoft will buy and use "Hope as a risk management strategy".
Like I said at the top, I'm not 100% familiar with Sharepoint so if anyone knows different (or more) please add your comments!
I attended a further session this morning on Quickr that I'm not going to post about (Quickr architecture & deployment options, ask me if you have questions!)
As they were going through I realised a couple of other big differentiators with Sharepoint (again, based on my limited knowledge of that product).
(1) Quickr supports offline access natively (and keeps the offline Notes & File explorer connector functionality)
(2) Quickr supports native Domino replication for distributed / clustered implementations
(3) Quickr leverages DAOS for duplicate attachment storage
One nice upcoming feature in Quickr Next (2H 2009) is the ability to drag an email into your 'Place'. Currently that will just move/copy the attachment into the place. In the newer version this will convert the email into an EML file, so you can keep the context of the file. Handy for those people who need to keep their 'really really important emails' forever.
You all know who I'm talking about :-)
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