The Quickr Blog

As others have spotted, and key IBMers have announced, the 64-bit Windows-compliant connectors for Lotus Quickr 8.5 have shipped:

It gives me great pleasure to announce that the Quickr Connectors now support Microsoft Windows 64bit and Office 2010. As promised at this year's Lotusphere, our development teams were hard at work on this one and I thank them for their great work and earlier than expected release.

The updated installers are available on Fix Central as Quickr Connectors 8.5.0.1_HF7.

In addition, we have also seen the latest Quickr Connector for IBM Connections ship:

With the IBM Connections Connector for Lotus Quickr, you can create associated Lotus Quickr team places for IBM Connections communities. A Lotus Quickr team place provides a central location from which a team can organize, share files, and collaborate on documents. Every IBM Connections community owner can optionally choose to create an associated Lotus Quickr team place. Updates made in the Lotus Quickr team place are aggregated in the community overview page, making it easier to stay current with projects and work collaboratively. Access control and membership of the Lotus Quickr place is determined by the often fluctuating IBM Connections community membership; it does not need to be managed separately. This version of the connector supports integration of Communities in IBM Connections 3.0.1 with Lotus Quickr 8.5 for WebSphere Portal, or Lotus Quickr 8.5 for Lotus Domino 8.5.

My comments:

• Undoubtedly the 64-bit connector is overdue, however I completely understand that the model for building this kind of Explorer-level plugin had changed in 64-bit WIndows and so it would take some time to build a new version.  
• I thank Mac Guidera and his team for getting this out of the door - there are a lot of customers waiting (not so) patiently for this code.
• The fact that so many have clamoured for the 64-bit connector just shows how important they are to the Quickr product.  At the time Quickr shipped back in 2007, they were unique in the marketplace and really added to the power of what had been a web-based tool until that point.  There are more tools that do this now (Dropbox etc.), but users still rely on the connectors to get their work done.
• Now that the 64-bit connectors have shipped, the attention will undoubtedly shift to the long-awaited Mac connectors.
• It's great that we have the new Quickr connector for Connections, I look forward to giving it a try.  However, it still feels to me as though this code should be part of the standard Connections product.  Given it just calls Quickr APIs, there is nothing to add there, so just put the code into Connections and make it work with just a few configuration switches.
• The Connections connector works well for a particular use case, having a Quickr place embedded within a specific Connections community with a 1:1 mapping between the two.  However a lot of customers would like to be able to do more to integrate the two products into one solution - adding two or more existing places into a community for instance, or pulling a feed of updates from all a user's places into the Homepage activity stream.  As IBM decides what to do with the Quickr J2EE product, I hope for more of the Quickr functionality to be brought into Connections to allow this to happen.
• Credit where credit's due, it's great to see these connectors ship. Thank you.

By: Stuart McIntyre | 5 Comments | On: 10 June 2011 06:48:00 | Tags:  quickr  onnectors 

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