Improved Quickr Documentation Now Online

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Recently, I've been working very closely with the development team to improve the documentation available around Quickr. As a practitioner just before taking on this role I had some ideas on how to improve the documentation. To that end, I met with various customers and business partners at Lotusphere '11 #ls11 and asked for feedback on how to improve the documentation. Today, I'm glad to announce that we have several new documents out there that you may want to check out.

First, there's a new step-by-step guide on how to deploy Quickr. The Quickr 8.5.1 server installation and basic configuration document gives you everything you need along with screenshots to start from 0 and get something up and running as quickly as possible. So if you are new to the Domino world or to Quickr, this document is certainly the one for you. Or if you are thinking of doing a Show-N'-Tell session at Lotusphere, then this is a good one to take screenshots from.

Second, I've asked the team to create a document that outlines the Best Practices for File and Page Migration From Quickr 8.2 to Quickr 8.5. This is in response to feedback that I heard not only at Lotusphere but based on the discussions going on in the Quickr Forum. Hopefully, this will help everyone who's planning a migration from Quickr Domino 8.2 to Quickr Domino 8.5.

Next, the Performance Tuning Guide for Quickr Domino 8.5 has also been made available. This guide should have everything you need to ensure that your server responds as fast as possible.

Fourth, it's now easier to see which languages are supported by Quickr Domino. To see the list of all 28 languages into which we have translated the product, check out the Selecting a different language document.

Finally, the API documentation for Quickr Domino has been updated. I've asked the development team to provide more examples and more documentation on how to use these services so we can get even more developers creating cool stuff for Quickr. Right now, phase 1 of this documentation update and there are 3 more phases which you will see rolled out in the coming days.

And there's one more thing... We are also working on creating a document that outlines the Best Practices for Customizing Quickr Domino. This document should be available very soon. It will contain a lot of examples of customizations that you can do and where you should do these customizations so as you upgrade to future releases of Quickr, you don't have to re-do a lot of the work.

Hope these new documents make your lifes easier and if there's anything else you would like to see, let me know in the comments below.

New 60-Day Free Trial for Multimedia Library for Quickr

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Today I have something new that's available that I wanted to make you aware. Lately I feel like all I'm sharing is news around releases and new software that is available. I do have to admit that It's very exciting to see all these new things happening around IBM Connections and Quickr. I think everyone gets excited when there's such momentum around something, no?

The ibm.com pages have been recently updated to announce a new program for the Quickr 8.5 Multimedia Library. So for those of you who haven't heard about the Multimedia Library... what is it?

The Multimedia Library quickly teaches end-users essential skills, productivity tips and much more to be successful using IBM Lotus Software. The latest addition to the Multimedia Library training solution is Quickr 8.5 - enabling users to work faster, smarter, Quickr. The Multimedia Library for Quickr teaches individuals how to create, upload, send and share documents and information with team members, as well as more advanced features on how to integrate Quickr with IBM Sametime, Connections and Lotus Notes.

For all those new customers that are getting started on Quickr and also all those customers upgrading from a previous release, this is a great resource to drive end-user adoption. Quickr 8.5 has many new enhancements for end-users, such as; a better browser-based rich text editor, ability to view entire threads in a discussion form and better version management. The Multimedia Library for Quickr 8.5 will show you instantly how to use these new feature and more.

The great thing about the new Try & Buy program is that you can get access to the full version of the Multimedia Library for free for 60 days. If you are not convinced that the Multimedia Library is for you after 60 days, simply uninstall it.

Interested? Here's a copy of the announcement:

=======================================================================================================

ANNOUNCING THE NEW "TRY & BUY" PROGRAM

IBM Lotus Education is excited to offer you a Free 60-Day Trial of the NEW Multimedia Library for Quickr 8.5 (English edition). Try & Buy gives you the ability to download the full version of the NEW Quickr 8.5 training tool for your organization. It gives you access to courses, lessons and hundreds of video tutorials showing users how to realize the full value of Quickr team collaboration software. Learn about "Try & Buy" and all Multimedia Library for Lotus products. Simply click "Try and Buy", register and submit your request for a Free 60-Day Trial. Soon after you've registered for the Try & Buy program, you'll receive an email with product download and installation instructions for loading the Multimedia Library for Quickr 8.5 onto a standard web server. Your organization will then have the ability to use the product for productive use during the 60 day period. The MML product can be used for training any end users in your organization during the "Try and Buy" period. The Multimedia Library for Lotus Software is a just-in-time training tool in use by nearly 5 million Lotus software users. Contact an Education Delivery Manager in your region or your IBM Sales representative if you have additional questions about this offer or any Lotus Education offerings.

Spread the word!

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Article first published as New 60-Day Free Trial for Multimedia Library for Quickr on Technorati.

It's Here: Customizing Quickr Domino v8.5

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A while back, I shared with you how I'm working very hard with our team to improve the documentation around Quickr Domino v8.5. This is mainly based on feedback I heard at Lotusphere '11 #ls11.

The team has done a tremendous work in this area. So far the following has been published:

• Step-by-step on how to deploy Quickr 8.5.1
• Best Practices for File and Page migration from Quickr 8.2 to Quickr 8.5.x
• Performance Tuning Guide for Quickr 8.5
• API documentation for Quickr Domino 8.5
• Update Quickr Domino to the latest OneUI
• Creating custom event handlers for Quickr Domino

And today, I'm glad to announce that we have a new whitepaper focused solely on customization based on the new Pages architecture in Quickr Domino 8.5. Here are some of the things you'll find in the whitepaper:

• Anatomy of the Quickr 8.5 theme
• What's new in the Quickr 8.5 for Domino theme
• Creating a custom theme
• Customizing forms
• Customizing widgets
• Migrating customized templates to the 8.5 theme
• Quickr for Domino hooks
• Other customizations

I would like to thank two partners who really helped review the content and make sure it was ready for publication: Snapps and Opus Neo. And of course, thanks again to the development team who's working extra hard to get all this stuff published.

The whitepaper is available in PDF format and you can download it here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/documentation/quickrcustomizing/

How To Customize the CKEditor in Quickr for Domino

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Last week I was asked how to customize the rich text editor that's embedded in Quickr for Domino. For those of you who don't know, the rich text editor included in Quickr for Domino is CKEditor.

So back to the task at hand. The request that I got was how to add the HTML source view to the rich text editor. The HTML source view allows someone with HTML knowledge to go in and customize the HTML or even used advanced HTML code to add more advanced content to the page.

I remember that I'd seen this tip out somewhere so I reached out to the social web. I eventually found out that the tip was shared in the Skype Quickr chat. This is a group chat of IBMers, business partners and customers who are all interested in Quickr. I believe the chat was initiated by Stuart McIntyre who also runs the Quickr Blog.

In the chat I found my answer and I figured I would share it with you in case you ever need something similar.

To add the Flash toolbar button to insert movies into the rich text editor:

Make the following change to this file:

data\domino\html\qphtml\html\common\qrdconfig.js

in Line 111 change from:

['Image', 'Table','Link','Smiley'],

to

['Image', 'Flash', 'Table','Link','Smiley'],

To add the HTML source view into the rich text editor:

in Line 119 change from:

['HorizontalRule', 'SpecialChar', 'Blockquote','Anchor']

to

['HorizontalRule', 'SpecialChar', 'Blockquote','Anchor', 'Source']

An Alternate Method

The method above has one difficulty... it must be re-applied every time you install a fixpack. Rob Novak has shared with us an alternate approach that won't get overwritten each time you install a fixpack:

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Here's how to do this without being susceptible to fixpack overwrites. Quickr Domino, being based on Dojo 1.3.2 and using widgets to render itself, now has a widget registry that is extensible. You can modify a file called widgetRegistryConfig_ext.js in order to instruct Quickr to use alternate widgets. So instead of changing the qrdconfig.js one directly, you can modify this file and tell it to use your own.

The easiest way to do this is to find the widgetRegistryConfig_ext.js file which is initially empty and located in:

data\domino\html\qphtml\widgets\resources\

Then, make a copy of the above referenced qrdconfig.js in another location relative to the html directory, such as:

data\domino\html\snapps\

Make the modifications to the COPY of the file you just made as indicated in your post - not the original.

Next, we need a controller to tell it to load our copy, so we copy over the file:

data\domino\html\qphtml\widgets\page\field\ckRichText.js

Into our new directory structure:

data\domino\html\snapps\widgets\page\field\chRichText.js

How do we override it? By using Dojo's provide-require-declare methodology (long subject) in our copy of this file. Near the top, just before the renderedit: function() we add the following:

dojo.provide("snapps.widgets.page.field.ckRichText"); dojo.require("quickr.widgets.page.field._ckRichText"); dojo.declare("snapps.widgets.page.field._ckRichText", [quickr.widgets.page.field._ckRichText],

Then the rest of the code remains standard until the end where we add the following:

dojo.declare("snapps.widgets.page.field.ckRichText", [snapps.widgets.page.field._ckRichText], { } );

So now we've told Quickr to a) use our ckEditor.js file, and b) consume our qrdconfig.js file, all we have left is to tell the widget registry it all exists. So we use the widget registry to force it to load the copy whenever it encounters the instruction to load the original. Add the following code to widgetRegistryConfig_ext.js (remember it was blank before):

{ registerWidgets: [ { type: 'REGISTERMODULEPATH', name: "snapps", path: "/snapps" }, { type: 'GLOBALREPLACE', source: "quickr.widgets.page.field.ckRichText", use: "snapps.widgets.page.field.ckRichText" } ] }

The GLOBALREPLACE type is what does all the magic.

Interestingly, a module path can be an actual path (like the \snapps one we added under html) or it can even be a Domino database to make widgets portable and replicable over clusters

-=-=-=-=-

Enjoy!

Updated iOS App Now Available for Quickr 8.5

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iOS users re-joice! Snapps has just published an update to their SnappFiles application in the iTunes App Store. SnappFiles for Quickr is a business app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch that allows you to access your Quickr places and files directly from your iPhone, iPod Touch and/or iPad. No modifications to your server are required at all; just point to the server, log in, and start browsing. The app is tremendously popular with reports that is being used by an elected President of a country.

The latest update published is version 1.0.5 which includes the following new features:

• Support for IBM Lotus Quickr 8.5.1 for both Domino and Portal
• Support for IBM Content Manager 8 (CM8) with Content Manager Services for Lotus Quickr installed
• Support for IBM FileNet P8 with FileNet Services for Lotus Quickr installed
• Support for IBM Social ECM Bundle
• Downloaded files can be opened in other registered apps, whether viewable by the native device viewer or not (iOS 3.2 and higher) — for instance, a non-viewable zip file may be opened in the Dropbox app, or a viewable PDF stored in iBooks
• Runs as a background app (iOS 4.0 and higher)
• Experimental support for Alfresco Open Source ECM, Documentum, and OpenText with third party integration for Lotus Quickr installed

I've been using the app now for a couple of weeks and like it a lot. It allows me to use Quickr as Dropbox for the Enterprise. I can easily browse and navigate my files. I find it really useful when I go to customer sites, pull down a presentation stored in Quickr and present directly from my iPad.

And speaking of Dropbox, the new version allows you to save downloaded files into Dropbox. In fact, this new version allows you to open downloaded files with any app that supports the "Open in..." dialog box in your iOS device, for example, iBooks for viewing PDFs (as seen below).

I believe access to your mobile documents on the go is key to driving adoption and accelerating your process in becoming a social business. Therefore, this app is must-have! To download it, you can get it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snappfiles/id352215859?mt=8

If you've never seen SnappFiles in action, take a peek at the demo movie here (which doesn't show the new features yet):

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Article first published as Updated iOS App for Quickr Now Available in iTunes App Store on Technorati.

Lotus Quickr and Connections Connector Is Now Available

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Last month I discussed some of the new features in Lotus Connections v2.0.1. More specifically, you now have the following capabilities:

The IBM® Lotus® Connections Connector for Lotus® Quickr™ allows users to create associated Lotus Quickr team places for their Lotus Connections Communities. In Lotus Quickr, they can organize, share files, and collaborate on documents from a central location. When a new Connections Community is created, the associated Quickr team place is also created and the access control and membership of the Quickr place will be determined by the often fluctuating Connections Community membership. Communities associated with a team place in Lotus Quickr can aggregate updates in the community overview page, making it easier to stay current with projects and work collaboratively.

Here's a couple of screenshots of how that looks like:

You can download this new connector from here. This connector works with Lotus Connections v2.0.1 and Quickr J2EE (a.k.a. Quickr Portal) v8.1.1 which I understand is already available for download.

New Quickr for Portal Integration with Connections

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A new widget for IBM Connections is now available which brings the Quickr for WebSphere Portal document library into a Connections community.

The widget augments the original Quickr widget because it maintains the user in the Connections environment, whereas the other widget would make the user switch back and forth. It's also nice because you can link to existing Quickr document libraries (or if you don't want to map a community to an existing Quickr library, you can make it so that a new document library is created and membership is synchronized). And just like the SharePoint and ECM widgets to communities, you have full access to the entire document library directly from Connections. You no longer need to go back and forth between the two.

Moreover, similar to the ECM widget for communities, the widget allows round-trip editing of documents stored in Quickr. I particularly like the ability to check-in/check-out documents directly from Connections as well as uploading documents of a specific document type and entering the metadata as required by Quickr, again all seamlessly happening from Connections. With this integration, a community in Connections becomes a place where members can come in and collaborate on files regardless of where they are stored: SharePoint, Connections, Quickr, or ECM.

Here's a screenshot that shows how it works:

  

To download the widget, you can get from free here in the Lotus App Catalog. Note in the instructions the additional system requirements you need to install.

GSX Releases New Quickr Monitoring Tool

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Just before going to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston I was notified that GSX had released a new tool to monitor Quickr on Domino. GSX Monitor has been around for a while and it makes it easy for IT staffers to manage and, well, monitor their environment from a single user interface. It can work with Microsoft Exchange, BlackBerry servers, Domino servers and now with Quickr for Domino, part of IBM's social software suite.

In the GSX Monitor console you can configure multiple Quickr servers and from the console you can:

• Monitor your Quickr server and service availability
• Track and monitor the availability of key places
• Monitor authentication, place, and catalog availability
• Utilize the new Quickr statistics for reporting

Here's a quick demo video that was put together that shows how you can monitor your Quickr servers along with Microsoft Exchange, BlackBerry and others:

You can read more about the release here and here's a list of all the new features in GSX Monitor v10. As usual, you can find out more in the Lotus App Catalog here. I'm excited to see all the cool solutions that business partners are building around our platform!

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Article first published as GSX Releases Updated Monitor Tool Now Supporting Quickr on Technorati.

Check Out New Videos for Quickr 8.5

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You may be aware that 2 weeks ago IBM released the latest and greatest release of Quickr 8.5 for Domino. There's been tons of buzz around this release. For example,

• This Week in Lotus Episode 16 - What's New in Quickr 8.5 (with my new colleague David Kajmo)
• Taking Notes Podcast Episode 120 - Everything you wanted to know about Quickr 8.5 and more
• IdoNotes Episode 81 - Quickr 8.5, Collaboration University and FREE plug-ins

I won't repeat all the new features since there's just too many and others have covered it widely. However, I wanted to make you aware that tomorrow, Wednesday September 29th, there will be a webcast to talk about What's New And Improved in Lotus Quickr 8.5 at 10am EDT. For more information, click here.

Let me focus, however, on something you may have not seen. As you may know, I'm a big fan of videos. To my delight, a new page has been created to demonstrate some of the new features. You can embed these videos directly in your deployment (like I've done in my blog here) or you can download them and play them from your internal site.

Here's a video of one of my favorite new features: Calendar overlay and iCal support which lets you view your team calendar directly in Microsoft Outlook / Lotus Notes. And since Google Calendar supports iCal, my next to-do is see if I can overlay my Lotus Quickr team calendar with Google Calendar:

To view the other videos, go here.

Enjoy!

Quickr 8.5.1 User Essentials Course Now Available!

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I'm glad to see all these solutions become available for Quickr. Yesterday, I was made aware of a new course made available by wareSource called "Quickr 8.5.1 User Essentials".

Here's the description:

Social networking tools provide a way for people to communicate and interact online. Lotus Quickr is a key element of IBM’s “Social Business” initiative that provides a new competitive advantage with an integrated set of social networking tools.

During this course you will learn how to use Lotus Quickr to share all types of content with your colleagues down the hall or around the globe using online libraries, blogs, wikis, discussions, and shared calendars and task lists.

You will learn how to create and secure new Places while serving as a Place Owner and Manager, add content using a variety of Item types as an Author, and serve as an Editor to validate and revise content.

You will also install and use the Quickr Connectors to share and work on files directly from other desktop applications.

To get the full list of topics covered and view a free sample go here. The licensing for the course is by user so take a peek. This may be a great way to get your users up to speed with all the new great things in Quickr 8.5 for an affordable price.

Live from Lotusphere -- the Opening General Session

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Here's a recap of what's going on at the Lotusphere Opening General Session (refresh to get the latest updates):

Factoids for Lotus products are being displayed on the screens (e.g. "93% of all customers are using the 2 most recent releases of Notes/Domino)

7:54am - The Orlando Symphony Orchestra took the stage to hype things up.. (Symphony, eh?)



There are TVs everywhere. This is so exciting -- it's my first Lotusphere ever!!

7:56am - The orchestra continues playing...

People continue to pile in.  This room probably fits 3500 people.  It's insane.  I think I'm one of the lucky ones as I get to stay in Dolphin hotel.  Only a couple of seconds until 8am.

8:00am - "EMERGENCE", the Lotusphere theme for this year has come up on all the TV screens as the orchestra exits "to the left" (Disney reference)

8:03am - GM, Mike Rhodin is introduced to the crowd!!!  Applause everywhere.  He says "how appropriate we begin the day with a little 'Symphony'"... I told ya!  His Lotus Connections Profile is shown on the TV screens.

8:05am - Just like Steve Jobs @ MacWorld last week, he wants to start by looking back at 2007.  He lists:  9% delivery growth for Lotus.  He rhetorically asks if people know who the guest speaker is ?  He hints at somebody from the Sports industry.  And the guest speaker is:  19th time Emmy award winning sports caster Bob Costas!!!

8:09am - Bob pokes fun at himself since he's not as famous as Neil Armstrong (past Lotusphere guest speaker)

8:11am - He says how cool Boston is with all their awesome sports teams:  the Pats go to the Super Bowl, the Red Sox are world champions, and the Celts have a good chance of winning this year's NBA championship!  He compares the Red Sox to the Cubs and how much better the Red Sox are.  The Boston attendees go crazy!

The international attendees around me are not laughing.. maybe Bob's speech is too American ??  Bob looks pretty old on the big screen TVs

  Anyway, he keeps talking about the greatness of the Pats.      

8:20am - Bob says that there's too much information out there and compares that to sports statistics.  He says that it would be great to have a better way to disseminate information and quickly access information that's pertinent to you when you need it.  He mentions Portal and connecting to people.  Bob feels like the 'Emergence' theme is like his next assignment @ NBC: covering the Olympics in Beijing later this year.  "The Chinese are the emerging power".

8:25am - Bob is done.  Mike Rhodin comes back to the stage!

8:26am - Cites a survey where almost 99% of CEOs claim that they need Collaboration to forge ahead. There are 3 styles of collaboration:  Document-centric (take a document and share it via email), People-centric (communicate via a mobile phone  / Sametime and demand immediacy -- can't wait for an email response), and Community-centric (what some of 'your children are using today in college and high school).  Mike tells the story of how he looked at his daughter's Facebook page and she was having an argument with a friend right on her page.  Other friends, including those from out of state, were mediating the argument.  Mike says that we as a corporation need to provide a social tool otherwise employees will use consumer sites.  (i.e. use Lotus Connections and not Facebook).

8:36am - Repeats that we need to innovate to increase revenue since cost can't be reduced anymore.  Asks people if they remember Knowledge Management and people nod.  He says that instead of managing knowledge we need to unlock the potential of people and set it free.  Shows a couple of Google search results (they return half-a-billion search results!!!).  This is clearly an overload of information.  Tells people are driving while looking in the rearview mirror (a slide comes up in the TVs with a Microsoft logo in the rearview mirror.. the audience goes crazy!!

8:38am - Atlas comes up in the screen and he briefly talks about discovery of connections.  Now shows Lotus Connections and how we pivot from point-to-point.  Says that most importantly, we need to get information in context and  shows Notes 8.  Announces that IBM and RIM (Blackberry users) can completely access Lotus Connections and show / provide information when they need it, where they need it.!

8:40am - Microsoft logo comes up on the screen with a lot of money in different currencies and then it all gets destroyed.  He says that Lotus Symphony is clearly needed to provide affordable word, spreadsheet and presentation solutions and spend typical Microsoft Office money on other things -- like research & development.  The CTO of SAP comes on stage!!!

8:41am - Mike asks him if there's a way to collaborate.  UPDATE: The CTO of SAP, Vishal Sikka, says yes and announces Project Atlantic.  Atlantic is a solution that enables all employees to access SAP data right from Notes 8.  No more training needed on SAP.  Customers can do leave requests, expense accounts, manager reporting, workflow approvals, etc.. all from within Notes 8.

If it runs on Notes 8, that means it runs on Expeditor, which means that it can potentially run on mobile devices.

8:46am - A preview of Atlantic is given.  I have to say, it looks beautiful!  A sideshelf plugin starts the application.  The data looks like its rendered in a Notes form.  The sidebar populates itself with Sametime Live Names and provides access to links to related documents (presentations, spreadsheets, help guides, etc).  Mike thanks SAP for their assistance developing Atlantic.

8:50am - Alistair Rennie takes the stage to talk about Notes/Domino 8.  Russ Holden and Jeff Eisen join him on stage to debate what's moving faster:  Domino or Notes (they are the chief architects of each respective product).  The debate starts!!!  Jeff shows all the cool stuff in 8.0.1 including DWA on the iPhone.  He says 8.0.1 will support Ubuntu and the Mac starting now (with the beta versions). Now Russ starts to defend Domino and shows statistics of improved Domino performance (I/O, CPU, etc).  Jeff says that that's ok.. and wants to show a demo. 

DWA on iPhone runs very fast!! I need to figure out how to become a beta tester

!!!

8:55am - The demo starts by showing the Quickr plugin in Notes 8 ( a guy named Ron is doing the demo.. I missed his last name).  He can now pre-configure call-in information for calendar invites.  There's a new widget palette in the sideshelf.  Most of them are Google gadgets.  To add them, simply go through the New Widget Wizard and you have four choices: Notes App, Web page, Google gadget and (one more I missed).  He adds a Google gadget to the sideshelf in 20 seconds!  Jeff asks to show how this can be shared through Collaboration.  You can email widgets to other users and they can drag-n-drop to the sideshelf and it runs in seconds.  He shows Live Text.  For example, you can select Atlanta in an email, right-click and get any information for Atlanta.. weather, traffic, etc (based on what widgets you have installed).  Opens Firefox and goes to DWA -- it's AJAX to the max.  Street addresses are automatically highlighted and linked to Google Maps.  It's pretty impressive.. it looks like you are running the client inside of Firefox!!  He has an iPhone and demos accessing DWA from the iPhone.  The UI is pretty simple, but fast!!!!  It has all the information you would need when on the road.  Back to Alistair.

9:05am - Alistair introduces Domino 8.5.  Russ says that he doesn't want to beat Jeff so "I'll take it easy on him".    Starts with ID Management, a new data store which will reduce mail files by 35%, introduces Lotus Protector (an applicance to get rid of Spam and Virus -- developed in conjunction with Internet Information Systems [an acquisition IBM made last year]).  Alistair says Russ is now winning and asks Jeff if he has anything to add.  Jeff says that he still wants to see a demo.  With SAP added, "Jeff is now in the lead.  Russ, do you have anything to add?".  Russ introduces, and is about to demo, Domino Designer 8.5 which can now develop Web 2.0 applications.  Maureen Leland takes the stage!  Shows a typical discussion DB and how it generates a nice-and-pretty web 2.0 user interface (it's really nice!!).  The Designer 8.5, of course, is built on top of Expeditor/Eclipse.  You can add AJAX "very easily".  Shows how to change the look-n-feel simply by changing the CSS.  A class browser has been added to make it easier when navigating LotusScript code.

Everytime a speaker is presented, their Lotus Connections Profile comes up.  Pretty cool.!!!

9:10am - Kevin Cavanaugh takes the stage.  Talks about Lotus Symphony.  In Feb 2008, Beta 4 of Symphony will be delivered. Announces a Road Show for Symphony.

Kevin's screenshots are on a Windows Vista machine!!!

9:14am - Bruce Morse takes the stage to talk about Sametime.  Tells Happy Birthday, 10 years, to Sametime.  Shows a video of using Sametime in radiology to make quicker, accurate diagnostics.  Very cool!!

9:26am - Ron demoes Sametime Advanced and the integrated Broadcast Suite tools.  Picks up the hotel phone and "calls my PC".  An alert comes up (with Caller ID) and he picks up the call in the PC!!  Nice!!  Shows how easy it is to create rules so that calls are automatically routed to the right number.  Rules can be based on ST status, time, location awareness, etc.  An incoming call into your PC can even be re-directed anywhere.  A call comes in, and he redirects the call from his PC to his cell phone and leaves the stage!  The audience laughs...

I still don't know who that Ron guy is, but he's pretty good at demoing Lotus products

9:27am - Larry Bowden takes the stage.  IBM WebSphere Portal is now the market leading portal product.  Announces agreement with SunGuard and GoPro to use Portal for their needs (multi million $ contract!).  Tells people should expect even more accelerators in 2008.  Says that 2008 is all about the power to the user.  Users can customize their portal in whichever way they want.  Asks users to join the WW public beta of Portal 6.1 (says that half of the customers are already there). 

9:36am - Ron now starts to demo a "local government portal".  Starts by showing Lotus Connections Profiles Person tag in a Portal.  Shows integrations with Lotus Forms -- shows drag-n-drop of one portlet into the Form portlet and -- the form data is automatically populated!! Audience "awwwss.. ".  Shows how to easily design a form in Lotus Total Forms in his browser.  Moves on to show Dashboard applications -- the pages render very fast!

Ron is demoing inside Firefox with the Vista-aero theme.  It looks pretty slick.  My battery is at 33%.  I hope I can make it to the end of this session.

9:38am - Jeff Schick takes the stage.

9:40am - Talks how web 2.0 makes it easier to produce and consume content.  "We have 10's of thousands of customers who have team spaces".  Quickr 8.1 in March.  Suzanne (missed her last name -- is that Minassian?? Looks like her based on her profile picture) takes the stage.  Something like Cattail comes on the screen!!  FilesNet and Symphony will have plug-ins into Quickr.  I'm still suspicious.. I'm pretty sure Quickr 8.1 has Cattail in it!!  You can tag files, subscribe to people, comment on files, send links to others right from Quickr, and rate documents.  Quickr 8.1 will use the Lotus Connections Person tag.  Shows easily moving a document into FileNet and start the workflow right within Quickr.  Then adds a file to a Lotus Connection Activity. 

 
My battery is at 25%.



9:49am - Jeff is back.  Starts to talk about Lotus Connections R2.  In 2008, Connections will support many more languages.  IBM on-track to be the first in the world to embed language support in the services provided by social software.  Connections will be integrated to Yahoo! Answers, Facebook, Confluence!!!!  Customization will be easier.  R2 will have Attention Management, which will drive attention to what's upcoming and important to you.  Lotus Connections Activities will work offline.  Suzanne adds a Yahoo! Answers widget to her Connections homepage!!  Demoes search where you can select which services to search (from a single input box).  A Profile will be integrated into Lotus Quickr via the Person tag.  Shows a video of accessing Lotus Connections from her Blackberry.  Retrieving a user profile takes 3 seconds!  Communities will have a Forum and you can save chats from ST into the Forum.  Communities will also be integrated with SocialText and Quickr.  Demoes easier Activity usage and template creation.  Once an Activity is marked as complete, you'll have a wizard to publish information into a Quickr place.

9:57am - A demo of Atlas begins.  Enters "lotus connections" and a visual network of people is displayed -- Gene Leo's photo comes up!!!  I think I saw my picture too.

My battery is at 21%.

  Do you think I'll make it ?

9:59am - Back to Jeff.  Today Lotus Mashups are introduced -- a graphical browser based tool so that business users can create new applications.  A widget library (which automatically discovers new widges) is part of the app.  This application is based on open-standards.  These mashups can surface in any environment:  Notes 8, web applications, etc.  Suzanne demoes Mashups.  She starts Firefox and easily drags a couple of widgets (organization hierarchy, salary feed and benefits feed) and wires them together.  A Domino widget (created with Domino Designer) can also be added to the mashup. 

10:03am - Back to Mike Rhodin.  Hype up music plays.. Something big is happening...

Did we buy Microsoft??

10:06am - We didn't buy Microsoft.  Today we announce Lotus Foundations -- appliances targeted to SMB customers.  A single Lotus Foundation appliance will have Domino, Quickr and FileNet on it.  Mike makes a reference to a MacAir and how Steve Jobs pulled it out from an envelope.  Mike, from an envelope, pulls out one of the servers!!!!  It's probably 6x8 inches!!!  WOW.  Announces Bluehouse, a SaaS for companies less than 500 employees.  Small customers will pay IBM to run a hosted collaboration service -- it will have everything: Connections, Quickr, Messaging, etc. Ron starts to demo Bluehouse.

10:11am - To register to Bluehouse, all you need is your name and an email address -- nothing else!  Goes to "Store & Share" a place to collaboratively work on documents.  From a spreadsheet he brings the New Live Chart wizard which makes it very easy to add charts to a spreadsheet online.

10:15am - Mike starts the closing statements.  Asks people to visit the Product Showcase.  Announces the Best in Showcase and the CTO's Innovation Award winners.  Thanks the audience for coming to the 15th Lotusphere and people exit!

My battery is at 12%.. I made it.

The Latest on the Quickr Connectors

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As Lotusphere #ls11 is now a dot in the rear view mirror, I'm still getting swamped with questions around the Quickr Connectors. For those of you who may not know, the connectors are a great way to get files in and out of team places. It integrates directly into your instant messaging client, email client (Notes and Outlook) and even to your Windows desktop. All of the actions available in the web UI are also available natively in the desktop (which really helps drive adoption).

In fact, I was surprised as I talked to customers from all over the world, their only interface with team places was through the connectors. Very few seem to use the Web UI. It was great to see how many people were leveraging this to improve their productivity. Here's a screenshot of how the integration looks in the desktop.

And because most people seem to rely more on the connectors than the web UI, I heard a lot of questions around future support. The top two questions?

1. When will the Quickr Connectors support Windows Explorer on Windows 7 64-bit?
2. When will the Quickr Connectors integrate natively (ribbon) into Microsoft Office 2010?

The questions were answered throughout various sessions at Lotupshere, including Ask The Product Managers which Mitch Cohen liveblogged (and you should go back and read if you haven't yet). In fact, in that session, Mac Guidera, the product manager for Quickr Connectors, announced that we have been working on it and should be available later this year.

As I mentioned before, post-Lotusphere I've also been swamped with these questions, so I figured I would recap the latest public information here and have something I can point others to very easily. If you want to know more details about the specifics and dates of when the Quickr Connectors will be updated, stay tuned to Mac's blog and this blog and you'll be the first to know.

Activities and Quickr Linker

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I happened to be casually browsing developerWorks today. I immediately noticed a Lotus Connections article about integrating Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections Activities together!!  Unfortunately, I can't Dogear it, but I hope that you find this entry good for now. 

As you know, Activities should not be used as a content repository.  Instead, it's a way to get a deliverable done.   You ask certain people to join in, provide their ideas or revise a document.  They in turn can ask other people to join in and collaborate.  Once a document has been completed, it has to be posted along with the rest of the intellectual capital.  This can be a Quickr place, a Domino database, or some other sort of content repository. 

But how do you easily get content created in Activities into a repository such as a Quickr place ?  Linker is, well, the missing link.  Linker is an Eclipse plug-in which lets you access a "tree view".  You can then right-click on any Activity item and publish it into a Quickr place as shown in these screenshots:




which results in the following:

Now this isn't production code.  Even though it's an Eclipse plug-in and it should run on Notes 8 (a.k.a Expeditor on drugs), the article merely serves as an example on what can be done with the Connections and Quickr API's.  The sample code provided in this article is pretty good and will help our business partners and customers get started on using the APIs. 

Demo: Monitoring Lotus Quickr Domino

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A while ago I got together with Steve Bystran from GSX who was here in Puerto Rico for vacation. Luckily, he was staying at a hotel that was very close to me and he offered to take an hour away from his vacation to meet with me. I had heard of GSX's monitoring solution for Quickr Domino at Lotusphere #ls12 but I hadn't seen it in person.

So we got together and I got to see a quick demo of how GSX Monitor integrates with Lotus Quickr Domino to monitor various metrics.

Today, you can use GSX Monitor to:

• Monitor Quickr server and service availability
• Track and monitor the availability of key places
• Monitor authentication, places and catalog availability
• Monitor the performance of individual places and send an alert if a particular place does not respond in a specific amount of time
• Use Quickr statistics for reporting

If you haven't seen GSX Monitor with Quickr in action, here's the demo:

Enjoy!

How To Create a Custom Event Handler for Quickr Domino 8.5

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Here's another Quickr Tip. Quickr Domino has a very powerful Event model which allows to intercept and modify certain events. You can use either C/C++ or Domino agents to intercept various events. Before writing hook interfaces, you need to decide which method is most appropriate for your environment. You also can combine C/C++ code and Agent code on one server. Using C/C++ for hooking into the events is the fastest method and reduces the impact on the server to a minimum. When writing C/C++ hooks, make sure the C/C++ code is clean and error codes are checked properly, because a crash in your C/C++ hook will crash the Quickr Domino server as well.

The previous example that showed how to use C/C++ hooks was specific for Quickr Domino 8.2. There's now an updated example specific for Quickr Domino 8.5. The example shows how to use Visual Studio and provides sample code that you can download and play with.

You can check it out here:   http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lqwiki.nsf/dx/Quickr_Domino_8.5_C_Hook_Sample_code

Social Software at Lotusphere 2011

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I posted this already in the Synch.rono.us blog but wanted to post it here for visibility. Also, while at Lotusphere (#ls11) , if you ever want to pull up a list of all the Social Software sessions at Lotusphere 2011, just go to: http://bit.ly/SocialLS11

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Are you psyched about Lotusphere 2011 ? You should be! We have a bit over 2 weeks left and I'm sure all of you are already planning your schedules for Lotusphere. We thought it would be a good idea to capture all the social related sessions at Lotusphere 2011 in one place. This way, we'll help you start thinking about which sessions to go to.   

Also, in case you missed it, Genii Software has created a Notes database with all the sessions in it. It's really nice because you can create your schedule directly from that database. Additionally, you can Tweet the session details or even check into it using Foursquare. If you need mobile access to the list of sessions, The Turtle Partnership has created a free Blackberry app. They also created free iPhone app. An iPad app is awaiting approval from Apple and will be available soon.

Note that this list does not include the sessions that will be presented at the Social Business Industry Symposium (sponsored by Wired Magazine).

Session ID	Session Name	Date/Time
JMP203	IBM Lotus Quickr for IBM Lotus Domino in Action	Sunday, 1:30pm
JMP205	IBM Lotus Connections 3.0 Administration Overview	Sunday, 1:30pm
INV101	Powering a Market Leading Business with Social Collaboration	Monday, 1pm
INV111	Making Decisions Collaboratively with Cognos Business Intelligence & IBM Lotus Connections	Tuesday, 10am
INV112	The Social Side of IBM's New Advanced Case Management Offerings	Wednesday, 10am
INV117	Social Media in 2011: 10-Minute Warning	Tuesday, 10am
INV201	A “Day in the Life” Exceptional Work Experience	Tuesday, 4:45pm
INV202	Building the Vision of an Exceptional Collaborative Work Experience	Wednesday, 4:45pm
INV203	Content-Centric vs People-Centric: The Copernican Revolution of Today's Business	Wednesday, 11:15am
INV206	Collaborative Decision Making	Thursday, 11:15am
ID301	What's New in IBM Lotus Connections 3.0	Monday, repeats on Tuesday, 11am
ID302	Best Practices for a Happy and Healthy IBM Lotus Connections Deployment!	Tuesday, 1:30
ID303	Exceptional Work Experience - Integrating and Extending Connections, Portal, Quickr, Notes, Sametime & ECM	Monday, 11am
ID304	Lotus Connections User Management and SSO: What you NEED to know!	Tuesday, 3:30pm
ID305	Build Large-scale Performing Enterprise Solutions for IBM Lotus Connections	Tuesday, 4:45pm
ID306	Compliance and Moderation with Lotus Connections 3.0	Wednesday, 4:15pm
ID307	What's New in IBM Lotus Quickr 8.5	Monday, 3:45pm
ID308	Architecture Deep Dive, Upgrade Deployment & Performance Best Practices for IBM Lotus Quickr for Domino 8.5	Monday 5:00pm
ID309	Extending Social Collaboration with Enterprise Content	Wednesday, 3:00pm
ID701	IBM Lotus Advancements in a Mobile World	Wednesday, 11:15am
AD301	Extending the Social Network – Part 1	Tuesday 4:45pm
AD302	Extending the Social Network – Part 2	Wednesday 8:30am
AD303	Connecting Developers and Community with Rational Jazz and Lotus Connections	Tuesday, 1:30pm
AD304	Customizing Lotus Connections 3.0	Tuesday 10am
AD305	Deep Dive on UI and Server-side Customizations for IBM Lotus Quickr for Domino 8.5	Wednesday, 4:15pm
AD402	Developing Exceptional Web and Mobile Experiences with Social Capabilities	Tuesday 11:15am
AD403	Repeatable Patterns with Industry Templates for Customer Experience Suite	Monday 1:00pm
AD501	IBM Project Vulcan: The IBM Collaboration Toolkit	Tuesday 4:45pm
AD504	Best Practices for Mobile User Experience Design	Wednesday 10:00am
BP104	LDAP: The Amazing Infrastructure Challenge	Monday 11:00am
BP105	Twelve MORE Things Your Mother Never Told You About Deploying IBM Lotus Connections 3.0	Monday 3:45pm
BP109	IBM Lotus Domino Admin to IBM WebSphere Application Admin - in 1 hour!	Wednesday 8:30am
BP114	IBM Lotus Connections Administration: From the Command Line to a Graphical UI	Tuesday 4:45pm
BP205	Quickr 8.5 for Domino Development: Forget Everything We've Ever Told You	Monday 5:00pm
BP206	Working with Feeds in IBM Lotus Notes and Domino	Tuesday 10:00am
BP303	Social Comes To You: How To Bring Connections to your Application in Context	Wednesday 11:15am
CUST102	From the Flintstones to the Jetsons: The Avery Dennison InfoXchange Story	Tuesday 11:15am
CUST104	BASF Implements connect.BASF: A Global Online Business Network	Tuesday 3:30pm
CUST106	How 3M got Social	Wednesday 11:15am
CUST107	Coles Supermarket: Social Computing in a Retail Setting	Wednesday 1:30pm
SHOW202	Enterprise 2.0 Hero: A Beginner's Guide to Installing IBM Lotus Connections 3.0	Tuesday 4:30pm
SHOW203	Lotus Connections 3.0 – Enterprise Integration for Administrators	Sunday, 4pm

There you have it. 42 social sessions during a three-and-half day span. So put on your Social Business hat and join us at Lotusphere 2011. See you there!

How To Give Quickr Domino 8.5 the new OneUI look

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Two weeks ago I blogged about how to make the Connection 3.0 UI look-n-feel like Quickr Domino 8.5. I've also received some questions on how to do the reverse. In other words, how to give Quickr Domino 8.5 the new look-n-feel in Connection 3.0+.

I asked the Chief Architect for Quickr Domino (Albert Wang) to see if he could pull this together. Very quickly he turned around and not only demonstrated that we can do this, but also created an article explaining how to implement this in your own system. Here's how Quickr looks with the new look-n-feel:

For instructions on how to do this, visit this article: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lqwiki.nsf/dx/Sample_Custom_Themes_for_Quickr_Domino_8.5

Enjoy!

Learning Experiences: A Successful Social Software PoC

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The following is a summary of a successful social software PoC that I participated on for a customer in Texas. I'm sharing it here so that you can compare how this company did things right, as opposed to that other PoC that went downhill.

Customer Y is an account I have been working closely with around Quickr and Connections. We've successfully setup a PoC for both products - the IT Manager signed off on a formal PoC Closure to ensure that it met his criteria. Technically it is successful, but it wasn't sold in our eyes - some understood the value immediately while it didn't seem of much value to others. Connections, just like any other social software, is really a product which should have content to understand its potential and value. Think of the early days of Facebook when none of your friends were there... how useful was that?

Last Friday we held a "user-adoption" or "getting started" workshop around Connections and Quickr (promoted internally by the customer and content/material/prizes provided by IBM).

The Goal

• Pump their environment with relative and pertinent content
• Have attendees "invite colleagues", share Dogear'd bookmarks, added to a Community, Team place or Activity so even those that do not come are notified about the products
  
• Have users understand that they don't have to be content authors to benefit from the value - you can take advantage of the info in Connections to gain business value
• Walk away with a simple understanding of what it is and have them access it from their desk the next time they work.

The Challenge

• We had 1 room with 10 workstations, for 4 hours - only have web browser to interface the products (do not have the chance to expose connectors and integration capabilities).
• Users will be coming in and out at their convenience, so no formal presentation that can reach everyone at once.
  
• Expose as much of Connections and Quickr as possible in 15 minutes max.
  
• Have them use the pilot environment again from their desk after they walk away from the workshop.
  

What Did We Do To Make This A Success?

We secured funding for prizes to attract attendees. I worked with the customer's resource to create a promo flyer which he posted on their digital bulletin board and printed flyers for distribution/posting within the customer site.

Laurisa Rodriguez created content titled "Getting Started with Lotus Connections". However, it covers each service in great detail - to complete all labs it would take a user at least an hour. I revised the material to the idea of "jump start" users. I took the easiest pieces they would find immediate value for in each Lotus Connections Service, and if they really like it, they can always come back and explore further from at their own convenience. In addition, knowing that we cannot reach the masses by attendance, I geared the material so they share and connect with folks that were not present. The authentication was against their real LDAP server and both products were configured to their production SMTP servers.

Even with the material reduced in content, we faced an issue of reaching the time limit, so we improvised and made 4 labs mandatory and 2 optional - it would change for users based on a discussion of what they wanted to walk away with.


Last, knowing that anyone who walks away with a 10-15 page packet will probably place it on a shelf and never look at it again - had to come up with an idea of how they would remember this even and hopefully access it again. I took existing slideware and created double-sided postcards (4 prints per sheet on stock card that was cut afterwards); it had the key message of "what is?" with links to their internal PoC environment and the other side had details to each of the services of Connections and Quickr so they know what might fit their use case if they forget.

Lotus Connections and Quickr Postcard

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: card reference)

Results Of This Effort

We had a turn out of 66 users (after only promoting the event for 2 days) from different lines of businesses (IT [including Directors], Marketing, R&D, Service Desk, Business Analysts, Sales, Customer Operations, and a few more). Within the first 20 minutes of the start, all workstations were occupied with folks waiting in the back to participate (3 more workstations were added to handle the additional users). Each person sent an invite from Profiles to at least 5 others to be their "colleague", expanding the network to 330 users from this event! More users were exposed from the other services as well. And folks were asking to take more than one postcard to distribute and share with their peers as they think it is very powerful or very cool. The feedback was great and the product sells itself when it's exposed in the right manner.

We met with the admin Monday ~1 PM after event, and he said 2 comments that really stuck:

• "My inbox is getting full with messages of attendees sending emails to their teams saying they didn't realized this was setup with real email integration and now telling their teammate about it."
• "It's growing virally since the introduction on Friday afternoon and I think we're going to have to give the VM's more resource as it gains popularity"
• "I'm surprised how the PoC environment was stable to handle this surge of data and run smoothly"
  

The best part is so many folks were exposed to it and if it gains popularity by different lines of businesses, it makes it that much more easier for the product to stick. And even if people do not contribute content, they will consume just from the Profiles service as it was pre-populated with real data. I think it was a real success and please feel free to re-use the material to help push the value further.

How To Drag-N-Drop Files in Quickr 8.5

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During Lotusphere #ls11 , and the days after, I've heard the same question a couple of times: what can we done to easily allow files to be drag-n-dropped into a place. This was doable in 8.2 if you were using Internet Explorer since we had an ActiveX control. The ActiveX control allowed you to easily drag-n-drop files from your Windows computer into a place in a snap.
The control, however, had some performance issues and it was highly requested by a vast number of customers that we remove it. In 8.5 we removed the control and we finally were able to build a UI that worked and behaved the same in all browsers that we supported. Our expectation was that most customers would simply use the connectors (which I heard is how 95% of people use Quickr) to achieve this same functionality.
Some customers, however, are wondering how can they get this functionality back. One of our developers from our Dublin lab has documented how to do this in the Quickr Wiki so that you can re-add this capability to Quickr 8.5 as shown below:

Once you follow the instructions, you will have a Java applet which will let you drag-n-drop files into Quickr. As an added bonus, because it's Java, it should work cross-platform. If you need this capability, simply follow the step-by-step instructions here.
Enjoy!

Quickr Connector for Symphony 3.0 Now Available

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Back in October, I blogged about all the social plugins that are available for Symphony. In there, I had mentioned the availability of a Quickr plugin for Symphony. That plugin, however, was specifically for version 1.3 of IBM's free Office suite, Lotus Symphony. Last week, the connector was updated to work with version 3.0 of Lotus Symphony.

So if you use Quickr and Symphony, then you'll want to download the latest Quickr connector which is now available in the Symphony plugins catalog.

Here's a screenshot of the Quickr plugin for Symphony:

To download, click here and then drag-and-drop the widget directly into Symphony and the installation will start automatically!