The Quickr Blog

On This Week in Lotus last week I hinted this might be imminent, then the NDA was lifted, and now here it is - the formal announcement letter for Lotus Quickr 8.5 for Domino:

IBM Lotus Quickr V8.5 for Domino streamlines user experience and is designed to reduce total cost of ownership

At a glance

IBM Lotus Quickr 8.5 for Domino makes it easier to share, save, and search important business content while collaborating with colleagues, clients, and partners. Performance improvements and administrative improvements are designed to reduce the total cost of ownership of Lotus Quickr for Domino.

New capabilities include:

• Streamlined user experience
• Native integration with Enterprise Content Management systems
• Feature enhancements you requested including recycle bin and lists
• More extensibility for easy customization
• More administrative control, reporting, and deployment options

Available from September 13th, this is a significant new release of Quickr/Domino, including:

Lotus Quickr 8.5 for Domino integrates with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories. New ECM integration capabilities are:

• Custom defined mandatory metadata entry, through the Web interface and via Lotus Quickr Connectors
• Direct connection with ECM repositories that allows native display and editing of ECM content directly from the Lotus Quickr Web interface
• Parametric search of ECM content

Adding features you requested makes Lotus Quickr 8.5 for Domino a competitive and compelling solution for managing business content. Some of the new features included in Quickr 8.5 for Domino are:

• Easy document check-in, check-out, and versioning from the Web interface and Lotus Quickr Connectors
• A recycle bin for soft delete capability, which maintains document security
• Round trip editing in all browsers, not just Internet Explorer
• Team calendar overlays to your personal calendar in Lotus Notes or Microsoft® Outlook
• Folder level access control making it easy to secure or share content appropriately
• Intuitive lists function to organize data sets and to provide an easy way to visualize, edit, and analyze tabular data
• Representational State Transfer (REST) services for page and document uploads and expansion of Web service APIs that provide additional extensibility and customization

Additional enhancements make managing Quickr 8.5 for Domino easier:

• Easier to manage with new and easier to use administrative control, reporting, and deployment options.
• Easy to upgrade with support for direct upgrade from Quickr 8.2 to Quickr 8.5 for Domino.
• Expanded and stored system usage statistics that allow trend analysis and easier optimization.
• Multilingual Lotus Quickr servers that are supported for organizations who use different languages. You no longer need to deploy multiple Lotus Quickr servers to support more than one language.
• Supports Windows single sign-on so end users can leverage their Windows logon for the Lotus Quickr browser UI and Lotus Quickr Connectors.
• Linux server support provides more choice of operating systems.

This release is a massive deal for all existing Quickr customers - the new UI, improved connectors and Linux support (+ 100s of other enhancements) all ensure that no existing or prospective Quickr customer should miss taking a good look at what's now available.  

I cannot wait to get Quickr 8.5 into production!

By: Stuart McIntyre | 4 Comments | On: 31 August 2010 10:08:00 | Tags:  quickr  lotus  domino  8.5  ga  announcement 

Rob Novak, president of SNAPPS, brings us news of the company's latest developments for the Lotus Quickr Services for Domino product line:

As I announced here on Aug 16th, SNAPPS was working on some user-focused plug-in modules for the "My Places" area of Lotus Quickr for Domino. Well today I can happily say it is a fait accompli, and ready for production! We've developed three to start with, and more are in the works. The Modules work with versions 8.1, 8.2, and 8.5 (beta or GA, when that comes). I've detailed them below, and you should see screenshots very soon - but the code is ready and evals are downloadable now. Our final stress test simulated what would likely be the largest single-server Quickr installation in the world, so I think we're ready!

Favorites Module
The Favorites Module gives end users the ability to - with a simple click of the mouse - create a link to their most often-used places at the top of the My Places list. Once there, the user can reorder the list, change the name of the link to what they want, or remove them from the list. In the My Places list, places that are already Favorites have a visual cue of a gold star next to the name. The Module is simple, intuitive, and one of the most requested features in the Quickr product. The Favorites module is licensed per user.

Custom Tab Module
The Custom Tab Module lets you add your own tab to the My Places area, with your own HTML and Javascript. It can be as simple as "Company News," "Privacy Policies," or "Usage Guidelines." Or, you can make it as complex as a charting application, dashboard, aggregation of data from other sources - there really is no limit to what you can do with this extra page! SNAPPS is of course available to develop your custom content for these more complex use cases. The Custom Tab Module is licensed per server.

InfoBox Module
The InfoBox Module lets you add your own text or HTML on the left side of the screen in one of five ways. You can create a separate box above or below IBM's "Tips" box, you can prepend your text in the same Tips box, append to the end of it, or replace it entirely! The InfoBox Module is licensed per server. However, if you purchase either the Favorites or Custom Tab Modules, we'll give you a license of the InfoBox Module as a bonus!

Rob has also created the first video demonstrating one of the SNAPP-ons:



Finally, Rob took part in a Taking Notes podcast this week, with Bruce Elgort and Julian Robichaux, where he explained the new solutions in some detail.  Well worth a listen.

I can't wait to get my hands on these tools - I can imagine that they will be very popular with all our Quickr customers that want to extend their Quickr environments.  There are evaluation versions available:

After angsting for a few weeks about building a new website, registration process, and all the beta testing involved with just the evaluation process, we decided to use what we already had - QuickrTemplates.com. Thousands of Quickr users, administrators and developers are already registered there, so we have built a second tab (once you're logged in) for Product Evals. It was very important to us to keep it clear that everything on the primary list of templates is still free! If it's been a while since you've logged into QuickrTemplates.com (and it shouldn't be - we updated the freebies just a couple weeks ago), simply enter your email address and click "Reset Password" and you'll get a new password immediately. Then log in, click on Product Evals, and all you need is right there on one page - downloads, instructions, and the key request file.

So download the SNAPP-ons and give them a try.

By: Stuart McIntyre | 0 Comments | On: 27 August 2010 08:55:11 | Tags:  quickr  snapps  extensions  domino 

After many months of development and with full GA coming sometime in the next couple of months, Lotus Quickr 8.5 Services for Domino has now been loaded onto the Lotus Greenhouse.

Community Manager Peter Burkhardt reports:

Lotus Quickr Domino 8.5 Beta upgrade complete

We have completed the upgrade of our Lotus Quickr Domino server to the 8.5 Beta version for everyone to try out!!  This upgrade took slightly longer than expected due to the number of places that we have (we'll need to do some archiving soon), but was very straight forward.  Please try it out and let us know what you think by posting comments and any issues that you may encounter to the Lotus Quickr Forum or send us an e-mail.

Check out the Greenhouse Quickr 8.5 environment:



Well done to the team for getting the new release online.

By: Stuart McIntyre | 3 Comments | On: 27 August 2010 08:29:16 | Tags:  quickr  beta  8.5  greenhouse 

Many customers I work with have Lotus Quickr 8.2 Services for Domino clusters, fronted by IP Sprayer technology for load-balancing and failover.  This solution works well for availability and performance purposes, but takes quite a lot of configuration.  

As usual, the Infocenter gives most of the information needed, but doesn't provide much context as to how or why these steps are necessary, nor indeed what to do if things go wrong.

An example of this occurred this morning, when one cluster showed signs of poor performance, rendering of blank pages after login, and lots of errors in the server consoles, along the lines of:

HTTP JVM: java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out: connect
HTTP JVM: at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
HTTP JVM: at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:59)
HTTP JVM: at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:41)
HTTP JVM: at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:528)
HTTP JVM: at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection$6.run(HttpURLConnection.java:1305)
HTTP JVM: at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(AccessController.java:251)
HTTP JVM: at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getChainedException(HttpURLConnection.java:1299)
HTTP JVM: at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:953)
HTTP JVM: at java.net.HttpURLConnection.getResponseCode(HttpURLConnection.java:386)
HTTP JVM: at com.lotus.quickplace.util.QuickrSupportUtil.doPost(QuickrSupportUtil.java:270)
HTTP JVM: at com.lotus.quickplace.util.QuickrSupportUtil.doGet(QuickrSupportUtil.java:133)
HTTP JVM: at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:499)
HTTP JVM: at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:588)
HTTP JVM: at lotus.domino.servlet.DominoServletInvoker.executeServlet(DominoServletInvoker.java:296)
HTTP JVM: at lotus.domino.servlet.DominoServletInvoker.service(DominoServletInvoker.java:237)
HTTP JVM: at lotus.domino.servlet.ServletManager.service(ServletManager.java:258)
HTTP JVM: Caused by:
HTTP JVM: java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out: connect

Firebug was also throwing up some very odd Dojo and Javascript errors.

By checking the output of NetStat commands, it appeared that the Quickr/Domino servers were trying to talk directly to the IP Sprayer to retrieve content (assumed to be CSS/javascript bundles), and the firewalls present in this environment were preventing this from occurring.

We tried opening the ports between the servers and the IP Sprayer, which improved the situation a little but performance was still poor and the errors occurred (though less frequently).

The next tactic was to add entries in the hosts files on the Quickr servers so that the FQDN for the IP Sprayer resolved to localhost, thus forcing lookups to be serviced by the local Quickr Domino server:
127.0.0.1  localhost    quickr.myorg.com

After restarting both servers, this worked a treat, with the errors no longer littering the server console, and performance being back to expected levels.  Hopefully, this solution will be of use to someone someday!

By: Stuart McIntyre | 4 Comments | On: 8 July 2010 13:10:26 | Tags:  quickr  domino  8.2 

Definitely one for your diaries:

IBM is hosting a Webcast conference call with IBM Software Engineers to discuss Sametime Integration with Lotus Quickr 8.2 for Lotus Domino on Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at 10:00 AM EDT.

The Webcast will consist of a slide presentation followed by Questions & Answers related to the material covered. You'll have the opportunity to ask questions directly of IBM Software Engineers.

Title: Lotus Sametime Integration with Lotus Quickr 8.2 for Lotus Domino
Date: Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Time: 10:00 AM Eastern US time, for 60 minutes

Webcast Details can be found in Technote #1438564

Post questions to the Sametime forum
In addition to asking questions live during the call, questions may be submitted in advance as a response to this announcement in the Lotus Sametime Forum.

Q&A transcript
This session will be recorded and a transcript of all questions and answers will be posted in the above technote after the call.


Visit the Lotus Support Technical Exchange Event landing page for a list of Open Mic calls/events.

If you are interested in learning more about Lotus Sametime 8.5 before joining this call, refer to the Sametime 8.5 Information Center.
Also, check out the new Whitepaper, Troubleshooting IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM Lotus Quickr integration issues http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/documentation/d-ls-stquickrtroubleshoot/


The IBM Lotus Sametime Team

By: Stuart McIntyre | 0 Comments | On: 7 July 2010 16:23:07 | Tags:  quickr  sametime  webcast 

Ebiz.net reports on today's public announcement of Lotus Quickr 8.5 for Portal at the Enterprise2.0 conference in Boston (following the formal announcement letter earlier this week):

New IBM Social Software to Help Enterprises Securely Manage Files, Blogs and Wikis

Today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, IBM announced new social software called IBM Lotus Quickr 8.5 for WebSphere Portal to help workers connect and adapt to information and insight, including files, blogs, and wikis in a rapidly changing business environment.

ebizQ received the following:

The software, which offers a higher level of integration with a variety of IBM and Microsoft offerings than the previous version, is available now.



Rheinmetall AG tested the new software. “Lotus Quickr 8.5 software will help our employees cope with daily business challenges and collaborate more efficiently with coworkers, customers and suppliers,” said Markus Bentele, Corporate CIO, Rheinmetall AG.

A recent study by IBM found that 98 percent of CEOs need to restructure the way their organizations work; 5.3 hours is wasted per employee per week due to inefficient processes. Two hours is spent per employee per day looking for the right information and expertise within an organization. IBM’s social software can help alleviate this problem because it helps keep global work teams better connected and more able to deliver results.

IBM Lotus Quickr helps teams create content, collaborate and work fast online together. It’s a companion product to Lotus Connections, software that empowers business professionals to develop, nurture and remain in contact with the network of their colleagues; respond quickly to business opportunities by calling upon expertise in their network; and discuss and refine new creative ideas with communities of coworkers, partners and customers.

It's a shame the Domino release of Quickr 8.5 isn't ready for a launch at this important conference, but I understand the reasons why this wasn't possible.  I'll be looking out for more coverage of the Quickr announcement over the next 48 hours.

More >

By: Stuart McIntyre | 1 Comments | On: 15 June 2010 21:35:34 | Tags:  quickr  lotus  8.5  e2conf 

IBM Content Manager V8.4.2 and IBM FileNet Content Manger V4.5.1 integrate IBM Lotus Quickr for direct connect integration between collaborative Web 2.0 tools, common desktop, and e-mail applications

Adding IBM Lotus Quickr to IBM Content Manager V8.4.2 and IBM FileNet Content Manager V4.5.1 enables robust collaborative team services and document management integration.

• Enables the discovery of enterprise content and provides seamless access to business documents across the organization, while leveraging collaboration tools and every day business applications (e-mail, Office, and other tasks)
• Provides organizations with the ability to handle content as a secure corporate asset in an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system, allowing content to participate in Business Process Management, and to be managed in accordance with content discovery, auto classification, as well as compliance and retention policies

These Web services components, components of IBM Content Manager and IBM FileNet Content Manager, enable business users to:

• Transfer collaborative content from Lotus Quickr to an ECM repository
• Incorporate existing ECM content inside collaborative team places
• Search Lotus Quickr and ECM content from a Lotus Quickr user interface
• Search IBM Content Manager and IBM FileNet Content Manager content from common desktop and e-mail applications
• Use the e-mail and desktop Place connectors to directly interact with content in IBM Content Manager and IBM FileNet Content Manager
• Use direct connect iWidgets to natively interact with content against IBM Content Manager and IBM FileNet Content Manager
• Extend advanced ECM services and function to broader collaborative team services and document management environments

IBM Content Manager Services V1.1 and IBM FileNet Content Manager Services V1.1 provide direct connect integration between e-mail and desktop applications and ECM, as well as enable Web 2.0 collaborative user interfaces and widgets to be used in multiple desktop computing environments (for instance, Microsoft Windows, Portal, and Domino). These Lotus and ECM integration points, enabled through these Web services components, unite the best-of-breed collaboration of Lotus Quickr and the industry-leading content management platform - IBM ECM. This provides the most complete single-vendor end-to-end collaborative document and content management solution in the industry.

More >

By: Stuart McIntyre | 1 Comments | On: 15 June 2010 06:09:39 | Tags:  quickr  lotus  filenet  contentmanager 

Formally announced today, electronic delivery on 15th June, 2010:

IBM Lotus Quickr 8.5 for WebSphere Portal delivers:

• New user experience
• Native bridging with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories
• More administrative control
• New library portlet to integrate Lotus Quickr content into WebSphere Portal applications
• Infrastructure update and expansion, including support for IBM WebSphere Portal V6.1.5

IBM Lotus Quickr Connectors 8.5 provides:

• Users with the ability to easily access and contribute shared content in Lotus Quickr team places and ECM systems directly from popular desktop applications
• Integration with Lotus Quickr and ECM systems from Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Symphony, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Windows Explorer

Whilst the Domino version of Quickr 8.5 has been held back for a little longer, it's great to see the Portal release making its way into the world.  The new features are evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but do tick the boxes for a lot of customer requirements - in particular the the use of the Lotus OneUI look and feel:

IBM Lotus Quickr 8.5 for WebSphere Portal provides user interface enhancements, increased integration, streamlined administration, and infrastructure updates. It includes:

• Updated browser theme to give users a consistent experience across IBM products, including Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal.
• Simplification of frequent user actions such as navigation within a place and common library, and document management actions.
• New rich text editor for browser-based creation of content. The same text editor is used across IBM products, such as Lotus Connections, giving end users a common experience.
• Increased integration between Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections, including top-line navigation, use of the person card, and integrated search menu.
• Simplification of member management inside Quickr places to facilitate end-user self-service.
• New place catalog with tag-based navigation that simplifies locating places, particularly in large Lotus Quickr deployments.
• Enhanced integration with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories, including new "direct connect" Web-based component that allows users to natively display and interact with ECM content from within a Lotus Quickr place.
• Parametric search of ECM content.
• Enhancements to Lotus Quickr Connectors to better support ECM content (refer to Software Announcement ZP08-0602, dated December 09, 2008.
• Easier, more flexible management tools with new administrator console that provides more complete user and place statistics, enhanced backup and recovery tools, and simplified place customization.
• New library portlet to integrate Lotus Quickr content into WebSphere Portal applications.
• Support for WebSphere Portal V6.1.5.
• Other infrastructure platform updates including AIX V6.1 64 bit, Windows 2008 64 bit, SLES 10, SLES 64 bit on System z, Oracle 10.2, Internet Explorer 8 on Windows, Firefox 3.5 on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Also announced today are the new Quickr 8.5 Connectors:

Using Lotus Quickr Connectors 8.5 so users can easily and naturally work together on content and access content contributed by colleagues directly from their favorite desktop applications. The connectors support check-in and check-out to help manage the process of multiple authors, and version control to ensure that everyone always has the latest copy of a document. Lotus Quickr Connectors 8.5 is included with other Lotus Quickr offerings and is also available separately for access to other content repositories such as ECM systems.

• Mandatory metadata enforcement - new, simple and intuitive interface to enter and enforce entry of metadata for documents.
• Notes integration - simple drag-and-drop of Lotus Notes e-mails into Lotus Quickr places.
• Sametime integration - drag-and-drop documents into a Lotus Sametime chat windows and Web conferences.
• Microsoft Office integration - native integration into the Office 2007 "ribbon."
• User-initiated publication to a content server that helps manage performance -- particularly useful in low bandwidth situations.
• Launch a search dialog from the context of a desktop connector.
• Support for third-party authentication tools, such as SiteMinder and Tivoli Access Manager.
• Support for single sign-on tools, such as SPNEGO.
• Support for multiuser installation of the connectors on a shared workstation.

It's fair to say I haven't seen as much of Quickr 8.5 for Portal as I have of the Domino release, so I can't vouch for any aspects of performance or usability at this stage.  Now that the code has gone 'gold' I look forward to getting my hands on the new release.  I know that my fellow blogger, Sharon Bellamy, has been positively drooling with anticipation waiting to upgrade her organisation's Quickr 8.1.1 environment, so I look forward to hearing more once she gets the code on June 15th.

By: Stuart McIntyre | 7 Comments | On: 8 June 2010 06:59:58 | Tags:  quickr  portal  8.5  connectors 

The process of integrating Lotus Sametime functionality into Lotus Quickr (for presence awareness and chat) has been covered a few times, most notably in the very useful (but now out-of-date) developerWorks article, Integrating IBM Lotus Quickr Services with IBM Lotus Sametime.

However, dealing with issues relating to this integration point has always been tricky - there are a number of areas where things can fall apart, most notably with SSO and LTPA token issues.  Fortunately IBM has published a new article, detailing the best practices approach to trouble-shooting any problems:

Troubleshooting IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM Lotus Quickr integration issues
               
Level: Introductory
02 Apr 2010

By Casey Brown, Purvi Trivedi, and Stephen Shepherd

This white paper provides a step-by-step guide to isolating root causes of IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM Lotus Quickr integration issues, including the configuration areas to check, for example, Domino Names.nsf, QPconfig.xml, STconfig.nsf, and firewall settings. In addition, we provide relevant debug parameters specific to hosting IBM Lotus Domino Servers, Quickr Servers, and Sametime Servers, to help pinpoint where Sametime and Quickr integration configuration fails.

In this article:
Introduction
Setting up SSO
Authentication / LDAP configuration
Authetnication / native Domino Directory
Configuration and copying files
STLinks troubleshooting
Home Sametime server
Understanding and troubleshooting dual-directory environments
Other troubleshooting areas
Best practices for Quickr Server
Best practices for Sametime Server
Working with Lotus Technical Support
Conclusion
Resources
About the authors

It's a really good piece of work, and from my experience, covers a lot of the bases.  Get the PDF here.

By: Stuart McIntyre | 0 Comments | On: 20 May 2010 08:27:54 | Tags:  quickr  sametime  integration 

The new RIM Blackberry Client for Lotus Quickr was published earlier this year, and has recently been updated to support Lotus Quickr services for Domino 8.2 (as well as the Portal version).

Here is a demo video from RIM describing the features and look/feel of the client:

Blackberry Client for Lotus Quickr from Stuart McIntyre on Vimeo.

Demonstration of the new client for Lotus Quickr.

Originally uploaded to http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en-GB&v=PViUhAZITsc - reposted to allow embedding on The Quickr Blog http://quickrblog.com

More >

By: Stuart McIntyre - Quickr Blog | 0 Comments | On: 6 May 2010 06:13:06 | Tags:  quickr  blackberry  lotus  rim  demo