Quickr is My Friend

After spending the last few days looking into Lotus Quickr, I’ve developed a sense of restrained excitement at what the product can do. I’ll admit upfront that I wasn’t too impressed with Quickr or the accompanying Snapps templates when I began looking at them. I was starting to get the impression that this was an IBM branded blog/wiki combination with a few half-hearted apps thrown on top. I was wrong.

A senior consultant at work pointed me at a redbook for QuickPlace (Quickr’s predecessor) today and it has opened my eyes. For a start, it was nice to see some documentation on the features that make it more than an expensive blogging solution. Examples include the Lotusscript and Java hooks that allow you to build applications on top of the Quickr framework, and the ability to automatically trigger C DLLs in response to Quickr events. So it turns out Quickr is more than an uninspired blogging solution, it’s a collaboration framework that happens to give you blogs and wikis out of the box. I’m now working on a custom 8.1 theme for my company and hope to turn it into a full blown template (application) soon. Wish me luck.