It’s been quite a Summer for new releases… hot on the heels of Notes / Domino 8.5.2 and Sametime 8.5.1 comes this update to Quickr for Domino. Yesterday we announced that Quickr 8.5 would be available on 13th September 2010 – today I attended our introductory webcast for the new version, so it seems like a good time to run through the improvements and new capabilities…

Performance – version 8.2 boasted some considerable performance statistics, and there’s further leaps with version 8.5. A re-design of the user experience hides the fact that there’s been vast improvements to the architecture under the hood, and it shows on our internal deployment. 8.5 flies in comparison to previous versions.

The rich text editor – the editor is a common component across web-based Lotus products, and supports richer editing than previous versions. Better support for images, tables and rich media such as Flash, and lighter versions can be used where applicable (e.g. comments in the discussion forum).

The document library – probably the most-utilised element of Quickr, so it deserves extra attention. It has a cleaner and more intuitive layout, and there’s been a focus on speed – both in terms of performance and the steps to create, edit and publish content. Focusing on an individual document, the user interface now resembles the look of Lotus Connections Files, with versions and comments easily visible. Click on the document image for a larger view.

Uploading of files – now a much more streamlined process featuring a ‘lightbox’ (rather than going through successive screens of options). The upload box allows setting of readership and authorship, providing a granular level of access control.

Discussion forums – another much-used element of Quickr… the user interface has been refreshed, comments are easier to create and view, and important discussion topics can be pinned to the top.

Connectors – they expose the Quickr document libraries into Notes, Windows Explorer, Symphony, Microsoft Office, Outlook and Sametime. Loads of new goodies… Sametime awareness and linkage to chat in the file properties, dragging a file into a Sametime chat to transfer it, and dragging a file into a Sametime 8.5 meeting to share it. The connectors are also supported by that strange Office 2007 ribbon thingy, so you can have full management of Quickr content from Office applications. Click on the file properties image for a larger view.

Lists – our Quickr Product Manager Dave Kajmo described lists as something that people said was available in SharePoint, so they wanted it in Quickr. Well, the functionality has always been there as custom forms and folders, but it was quite well-hidden. The lists functionality makes it more accessible and adds some major improvements. The process of creating the custom form is far better, and the resulting form has a much better look and feel… same goes for the customisation of the list’s view. You can also create a list from an existing spreadsheet (Open Document Format or Excel).

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) integration – loads of good stuff here, but for me the stand-out feature was the fact that the Quickr connectors honour the ECM’s mandate for metadata. So when a file is checked in, a dialog box will appear and request the metadata. No check-in allowed until the details are provided.

Drag and drop into Notes – this has been available in previous versions, but the Quickr 8.5 connectors will format the resulting link very nicely, as illustrated here.

Calendars – the new Quickr team calendar is lifted directly from Lotus iNotes, so it now has a tasty look and feel. If you’re a Notes 8.5.1 + user, you can add the Quickr team calendar as an overlay to your own calendar.

Multi-lingual server – multi-national customers can now take advantage of a single Quickr server to serve users in any country. The language that displays in the browser is simply based on the browser’s language settings. The demo this afternoon showed switching from English to Japanese on the fly.

There is more (admin, analysis, enhanced third-party authentication, and, oooh, a Linux server), but I want to go to bed in a minute. I’ve showed you some small snippets of the Quickr user interface, but I’ll leave you with a bigger view of the document library – click on the navigation panel to the right.

It’s a busy week for announcements in Lotus-land, but that tends to happen around the time of DNUG (which is this week, so there you go). Already this week Stuart McIntyre blogged about the new version of Lotus Quickr 8.5, which we have available internally with IBM and is a major upgrade (and a great product). More about that another time.

The other big announcement this week is the support for IBM Lotus Notes Traveler on the iPad. This momentarily had me scratching my head, because I set up Traveler on an iPad a couple of weeks ago – it’s a great e-mail, calendar and contacts experience, and simple to get running. So what’s the announcement? It’s official support for Traveler on the iPad, and also for the Traveler Companion which manages encrypted e-mail.

In time other applications will be supported… LotusLive Meetings and SnappFiles for Quickr. Both of these work fine on an iPad today, they’re just not supported yet. And I’m sure there’ll be more iPad applications to come.

I was perusing PlanetLotus today and an interesting blog post from Vaughan Rivett caught my eye – what’s the worst email in-box that you have ever seen? Vaughan tells the tale of a user with a mail box weighing in at 11 gigabytes. This is what’s known in the trade as either a) hoarding or b) bad management. Mail boxes of that size could never be tolerated at IBM, because like so many companies we impose a mail quota – your mail box gets to a certain size, some things stop working, and the functionality isn’t given back to you until you’ve fixed the problem. But is that fair? After all, was it the mail box owner at fault?

I’m speaking as someone who recently had to concede that, after more than 10 years with a 150 mb mail box quota, I could no longer keep it within the limit every day – I was spending too much time managing the volume, so I had to apply to go up to the next level, 250 mb. Why, in an organisation with a rich collaborative infrastructure, was this necessary? I put it down purely to my change in role – suddenly I was communicating with many more people and there was an increase in data flying around. It reminded me of a slide I sometimes use on less serious occasions, such as the recent keynote at Collaboration University. Entitled ‘about me as an e-mail user’ it explains that I don’t like having a scroll bar in my inbox and I resent anyone who…

• Forces me over my mail quota
• Sends me two e-mails when only one was required
• Marks everything they send as high priority (yes, I know who you are)
• Starts an e-mail with “I know you’re busy but…” – but what?
• Sends me an e-mail and then immediately Sametimes me or phones me to ask if I’ve read the e-mail
• Continues to reply-to-all way past the point where I’ve ceased to be involved or interested
• Only knows how to use PrtSc rather than Alt-PrtSc

So in summary, just about anyone who sends me an e-mail.

A couple of years ago I did a small survey of some of our customers, not big enough or detailed enough to draw any great conclusions from, and asked the question…

In terms of e-mail efficiency what would benefit your organisation the most – improvement in user practises around e-mail, or operational improvements?

71% said user practises, 29% said both, but no-one (0%) said operational improvements alone. So the conclusion is that end users need to be given the tools in order to become more efficient with how they disseminate information, but they also need some clarity about the right tools to use and when.

I believe that we’ve added the right things to the Lotus portfolio to help end users to realise better collaboration and knowledge management – simple things that make a difference. Firstly, think how your typical e-mail user would share a spreadsheet, document or presentation with a colleague (or group)… we all know the right thing to do is to post it to a collaborative space (which hopefully supports the business activity associated with the content) and then notify people of the content via e-mail. However, most e-mail users have escaped from Utopia via a small hole in the fence, so they’re just going to shove that file attachment in the e-mail regardless of the storage or content revision issues.

That’s why I love the Quickr approach – because it supports the users’ long-ingrained behaviour (shove in the attachment) but at the point of sending it offers to place the file in a document repository. The recipient sees a set of links, and they click to navigate to the content. Simple. So collaboratively we’re doing the right thing, but we haven’t interrupted the user’s normal pattern of work (in my head I’m picturing people grunting like Cro Magnon man did when he spotted a bison wandering across the Paleolithic plains, but instead they’re saying “ugg, file attachment”). The added bonus with Quickr is that you can also take existing file attachments that Cro Magnon man sent to you in the past and offload them to a Quickr place – you can retain the e-mail with the link replacing the attachment.

The other thing I love telling people about is Connections Files. To fully embrace the idea of Connections Files you do have to discard the caveman instincts and post that file… no, not in an e-mail, in your Connections file-space. Yes, I know this goes against years of bad habits, so the important thing is for users to realise the benefits. The first benefit is to other people – you are not contributing to ruining their day by sending that quota-busting spreadsheet. Okay, so you don’t care about their quota, how about a benefit for yourself? Have you ever sent an e-mail with a file attachment and then later someone else wants the file? And then someone else a bit later? This used to happen to me all of the time, but not any more. Rather than having to repeat the process of create another e-mail, type in the subject, find the file attachment in a folder (hmmm, which folder), add an explanation – I just share the file. The file in question is posted in Connections Files and I add another name to the share list. An e-mail is automatically sent, and the recipient grabs the content but doesn’t have to worry about the volume of data. If the file is updated, I simply add the update as a new version and note the changes.

Another great way to share content, in the context of a business activity, is Lotus Connections Activities, but I’ve already covered that in an earlier post.

Collaboration University – the education event for customers and Business Partners on the subjects of IBM Lotus Connections, Quickr and Sametime – takes place on the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of September 2009 at IBM South Bank (London). This year there’s an added incentive to attend. As well as hearing from collaboration experts such as Rob Novak and his team from Snapps, Carl Tyler, Chris Miller, Gabriella Davis and Warren Elsmore (to name but a few), this year’s keynote speaker will be worth the registration fee alone… it’s me. Rob Novak blogs this historic announcement.

But seriously, I’m very honoured to be asked to speak at Collaboration University because the two events (the other is in Chicago) are among the most prestigious and valuable on the Lotus calendar. If you’re going to be implementing Lotus collaborative solutions, or simply want to discover the value they can bring to your organisation, I can highly recommend attending Collaboration University. Just don’t heckle the keynote speaker.

By the way, I know that’s not a good photo on Rob’s blog. I had to get a photo sent in a hurry for a press article, something in a suit rather than bearded and wearing a t-shirt, so the current Mrs Adams took that photo outside one evening. I since have a better photo, which I hope Rob will use rather than this one.

IBM have launched a new set of web pages under the title of Web 2.0 Goes to Work for Business. It features information about existing solutions such as IBM Lotus Connections, Quickr and Sametime, new solutions such as IBM Mashup Centre, and solutions from the other IBM Software brands which allow you to build Web 2.0 applications.

This seems like a good time to remind everyone that IBM Lotus kicked Microsoft’s butt at the Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston (June 2008). I know it’s already been covered on edbrill.com (amongst others) but it’s worth enjoying those quotes again…

“IBM’s Lotus Connections looked, at minimum, a year or more ahead of SharePoint in its social computing capabilities out of the box. It was a lot prettier looking, too.”
C. G. Lynch, CIO Magazine

“IBM came off looking better for various reasons. They fielded a more focused demo team – never to be underestimated – but also because Connections has some slick Ajax interfaces, and SharePoint does not … SharePoint in contrast, came off as quite boring, and in the ‘back-channel’ chat room a lonely, dogged Redmond representative got tortured by attendees.”
Tony Byrne, CMS Watch

It seems that my good friend and Domino / Blackberry expert Mike Smith (of The Turtle Partnership) has lined himself up with a busy week in September. For the first three day of the week commencing 15th September, Mike is busy as one of the chief organisers of Collaboration University in London. For the unenlightened, Collaboration University is an absolutely first class education event covering IBM Lotus Sametime, Lotus Quickr (note, with a lowercase ‘r’) and making it’s debut this year, Lotus Connections. As in previous years, there’s a host of great speakers, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

After three days of hard graft Mike should be putting his feet up, but it seems he’s a sucker for punishment. Mike has volunteered to be on the organising commitee of UKLUG (that’s the UK Lotus User Group), and the two day event in London follows straight on from Collaboration University. Warren Elsmore, task-master that he is, has already got Mike working on a rather important part of UKLUG (I’ll say no more). Note that the UKLUG event is spread over two days this year, and we’re hoping for around two hundred and fifty attendees. Registration is open now. I hope to see you there, and if you see a tall guy looking happy but a bit worn out… go easy on Mike, he’ll have had a busy week.

Over the past couple of years there have been a number of what I call ‘eureka moments’… that moment when the usually-invisible light bulb above your head switches on and you either “get it” or something resonates. One such moment was a couple of years ago when I saw Charlie Hill (now an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the Chief Technology Officer of Lotus software) talking about and demonstrating ‘Activities’, which have since become part of IBM Lotus Connections.

Activities are a simple premise. People work on business activities (duh, yeah) and these business activities are comprised of lots of different pieces of information and content which often derive from and live in different places – for example e-mails, calendar appointments, documents, tasks, web pages, instant messaging chat transcripts, and so on. So an activity is a ‘place’ for bringing the team together and sharing the content. You may ask why that can’t be done in a TeamRoom, Quickr place or some other collaborative solution. Well, it can. The point here is that an activity is something which is quick and easy to set up, to add members to, and is suitable for the smallest of tasks right up to something which is more involved and longer in duration. You might set up an activity just to review a document or plan one meeting. You might set up an activity to plan an entire event (as we have done with Lotusphere Comes To You). If however your project is going to last for a year you might be better off with a Quickr place.

A more recent eureka moment came when the feature set of Lotus Sametime Advanced was announced. Some of the features (i.e. the broadcast suite) were already familiar to IBM folk since they had been available internally as the IBM Community Tools. The big new feature as far as I was concerned was chat rooms. For me to explain this fully, you need some background, and that background concerns e-mail.

Ask anyone what their major issues are where e-mail is concerned and they’ll generally say two things… the first is the sheer volume they receive, and the second is the number of file attachments. Dig a bit deeper and you’ll actually discover a more fundamental set of problems… people are hooked on e-mail, they spend a lot of time watching their inbox, and they are very reactive to what comes in. To quote the Butler Group, the overloaded inbox creates a “false sense of panic”. People forget their business priorities and focus on making sure they keep their inbox in check, even if they’re dealing with trivial, less pressing items to do so. Where companies impose size quotas people have the added worry about their total mail box size going over the limit, so they spend time ensuring the size is kept in check rather than focusing on their job.

Some people on the other hand just give up. I’ve seen people with over 2,000 unread e-mails in their inbox. In a way this could be quite liberating – you’ve lost control, so why not just delete them all… a bit like being £5 million in debt, what does it matter if you blow £10,000 this weekend?

Even more interesting, ask someone what the solution to the overblown mail box problem is. If they say “archiving” that’s the wrong answer. That’s a solution to a symptom, not a cure for the disease. One of my favourite slides at the moment is entitled “What? How can I be over my mail quota again?” – and contains a screenshot, a real screenshot, of my inbox with over 40 mb of file attachments received in one day. How can this happen in IBM? There’s some interesting facts about these e-mails. The attention indicators (Notes 7 and 8 feature) tell me that none of these e-mails were sent to me only or even a list of less than five people including me. None of the e-mails came from the Lotus UK team. We have a very strong practise of sharing information via Quickr or Activities. But clearly there some people with bad habits. It’s not that we don’t have the technology… I actually think we have too much. As well as Quickr and Activities there are various other ways to share documents including some un-productised research projects. This goes to prove what we’ve always known, that collaboration is cultural – you can put the technology in place, but people have to realise the pain and then see the value. Either that or you stand behind them with a large piece of wood with a nail sticking out the end of it.

So, having solutions like Quickr (with it’s Connectors for Notes and now Outlook) and Activities can help to cut down the volume of file attachments. But what about the number of e-mails? Think about this… every e-mail you send has the potential to spawn several more over the next few days and maybe weeks. Reply-with-history seems to be a default (minus file attachments of course), so you get the same e-mail again (and again, and again) with a extra dollop of text each time.

This returns us very nicely to the subject of Sametime Advanced chat rooms. I’m not suggesting for one minute that chat rooms will replace e-mail, but I suggest that they can replace e-mails for selected business activities. Along with all of the other items that you gather, you can associate a chat room (or rooms) with a business activity and define that as the place to communicate. Everyone can see the transcript, no-one has to ask for the history (not even late joiners). No-one has to repeat anything as the transcript exists as one continuous persistent dialogue, even if you step out of the dialogue for several days or perhaps weeks. The chat can be real-time, or can be asynchronous as you can catch up on the discussion later. And through a rather neat capability which plugs into the Sametime client you can be alerted to activity going on inside the chat room so that you join in.

E-mail is here for the duration, but you need to be ready for the day it gets side-lined and overtaken by more effective methods of communication and collaboration. To quote an old marketing campaign, I use Lotus solutions and I AM ready for that day.

What a week… I arrived at Cape Town on Tuesday morning, in the nick of time to present at the launch event for our three new offerings (Notes 8, Connections and Quickr). That evening I flew to Johannesburg with my colleagues (Ross, Uffe and local-boy Hannes) ready for the next event and a meeting with the press on Wednesday. The Joburg event (in the swanky Melrose Arch development) was crammed to capacity with an audience of around 140 attendees. This was followed by dinner at the Butcher Shop in Nelson Mandela Square (I had ostrich – but not a whole one, and not even a leg). An early flight to Durban started the Thursday agenda, and Friday consisted of some customer visits before a late lunch at the Indigo Moon restaurant in Pretoria.

Reaction to the new products was amazing. I’ve already heard that one company in South Africa has already upgraded to Notes / Domino 8, and an attending CEO has taken the decision to move in Notes / Domino 8 in place of Outlook / Exchange in his company. That speaks volumes. And again, just like some recent events in the UK, I had numerous conversations with people very serious about replacing Microsoft Office with the free integrated productivity editors.

I came to one important conclusion while travelling in and out of South Africa… they really need to sort the airports out before the 2010 World Cup. Okay, they have improved the departure gates at Johannesburg, but the check-in area is still absolute bedlam. They seem to think the best way to reduce unemployment is to give everyone a job at the airport (but not assign them any duties… just let them stand around doing nothing).

Cape Town airport isn’t much better – I arrived at 08:20 in the morning and it was the only flight coming in. I got off the plane and got to the luggage carousel within 15 minutes (great)… but it was a further 40 minutes before my case arrived. Acceptable for a large airport with a lot of flights arriving, but not a small airport handling just one flight.

I travelled out in Premium Economy (or ‘World Traveller Plus’ as British Airways call it). Officially I was eligible for Business Class (over 10 hours, overnight, work on arrival) but I find gaining approval too long-winded and tiresome. So I opted for the easy approval option of World Traveller Plus – this worked well as I had the first row with plenty of leg room. However the return journey promised to be a nightmare, in cattle-class shoved in a tiny seat with no leg room or elbow room for 11 hours. Things promised to get worse – even though I checked in fairly early (after battling for 15 minutes to join the end of the queue) there were no aisle seats left (groan). I requested a seat move if at all possible and carried on. After a cuppa and a mooch round the shops I went to the gate to find that they’d found me an aisle seat, 28J. Economy, but an aisle seat, so an improvement. What I didn’t know until I got to 28J was that this newly-allocated seat was in World Traveller Plus… and, double bonus, was on it’s own next to the emergency exit so I had 7 feet of leg room (more than enough) and no-one beside me. Thank you British Airways.

Lotus Quickr, the collaboration solution for serious grown-up business people, is now shipping. But we need to get a couple of things straight.

Firstly, it’s Quickr with a small ‘r’. Quickr, and not QuickR. Check out the Quickr web site for proof.

Secondly, it’s pronounced “Quicker”. The name just happens to have an ‘e’ missing. It’s not pronounced “Quick-Arr”. Think about that popular photo-sharing web site. No-one calls it “Flick-Arr”. Not unless they’re from Devon or Cornwall. Or a they’re a pirate.