Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Design

More IBM Collaboration Tools; This Time from Lotus


Collaboration is on everyone's mind these days. Last week, it was IBM Rational showing off Jazz.net; this week it is IBM Lotus announcing Lotus Quickr.

Quickr is team collaboration software that includes a wiki and integration with everyday office applications from Lotus and Microsoft. Lotus Quickr offers a simple team collaboration model with a shared content library, team workspaces, wikis, blogs, and business templates that can be extended to include other new social networking elements such as bookmarking and tagging.

At the heart of Quickr are "connectors" -- mini-applications that integrate Quickr capabilities with other everyday applications. For example, users can easily access designated content directly from IBM Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Windows Explorer, and Microsoft Office software and store it within a Quickr shared library. Additionally, IBM plans to expand Lotus Quickr's interoperability by providing a connector to Microsoft Outlook e-mail software later this year.

Benefits of Quickr include:

  • Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX have been incorporated into Lotus Quickr to deliver a graphical, Web-based user interface customizable by average users. This Web 2.0 interface includes Web features such as right-click dynamic action menus and drag-and-drop options to help move documents in and out of team spaces. Lotus Quickr provides the ability to publish team blogs, use the built-in wiki technology for creating content, and assign tags and permalinks for archiving. A key Web 2.0 feature is the use of an advanced content syndication tool to both publish and consume Atom-based news feeds.
  • Support for open standards: Lotus Quickr integrates with Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007, Microsoft Windows Explorer on Windows XP and Windows Vista, IBM Lotus Notes 7 and 8 (with planned support for Lotus Notes 6.5) and Lotus Sametime 7.5. Lotus Quickr supports Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers, providing Web access from Windows, Linux, and Macintosh desktops.
  • Lotus Quickr includes business templates such as project management, image repository, dynamic surveys, and more. All templates are customizable, letting users change the look-and-feel and add pre-built components, such as team blogs, project calendars, or announcement pages.
  • When documents are sent from a single user to a group for feedback, the process of tracking edits and changes over e-mail can be inefficient and prone to error. Document and application templates let users share ideas as they collaborate, tracking changes as they take place. Lotus Quickr software's wiki technology provides an in-line web editing option that allows a user to revert back to an earlier version of a page.

Planned enhancements to Lotus Quickr include integration with IBM's enterprise content management (ECM) systems. Customers will be able to use Lotus Quickr to collaborate on content and leverage IBM FileNet P8 and IBM DB2 Content Manager information management capabilities.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.