Collaborate From Anywhere...The Value Proposition of Lotus Quickr
If I had to pick a common Achilles' Heel among the various collaboration systems I've worked with through the years, I would probably point to the fact that each system usually has a single point of entry. That is, you have to (virtually) leave the place you are currently working in order to go to the "place to collaborate". I've found this to be true of Lotus Notes document libraries and Team Rooms, Documentum, Quickplace and other web-based repositories and even Sharepoint (depending on the tools you are using). This creates a barrier of entry for a lot of people. They just don't want to have to open yet another window on their already crowded workspace in order to use collaboration tools. In addition, having to leave the context we are currently working in in order to share with our colleagues interrupts our flow state and makes us less productive. Just as effective collaboration has a cultural component that is vitally important, so too must the tools facilitate easily contributing to and consuming from the collective knowledge pool. Thus, one way to shore up that Achilles' Heel is to provide multiple entry points into the collaboration tool of choice. Lotus Quickr has introduced such mechanisms and by doing so really provides a compelling value proposition for team collaboration.
One of the driving goals for Lotus Quickr (and indeed the entire line of Lotus products) is the concept of collaborating in context. Collaboration in context is all about integrating content, tools and people (all the important components of the collaboration equation) within your business process. A great example of this is the Sametime presence awareness capability. If I'm in a TeamRoom and have a question about a document, I can immediately see if the author is online and can initiate a new chat session with them all from the place where my attention is currently focused. Quickr takes this idea to a new level through the Quickr Connectors.
If you've seen Quickr out in the wild, you've probably seen the web-based UI. While certainly shiny and new, this UI only shows one facet of the product. If you choose to, you can access all of the collaborative features of Quickr by opening your browser and navigating to your Team Place, but the beauty of the Quickr Connectors means you don't have to. Instead, you can access Quickr content and add to Team Places from where you already are. This includes:
Lotus Notes
Microsoft Office
Lotus Symphony (coming soon)
Windows Explorer
Lotus Sametime
Quite an impressive list! IBM rightly realized that when people collaborate, there is usually some artifact that prompted the collaboration process. For most knowledge workers, this means we are authoring documents, usually in one of the tools listed above. Rather than making users take extra steps to get that content to the "place to collaborate", Quickr was designed to meet people where they are actually doing their work. This is a huge leap forward in my mind, as it removes that big stumbling block that plagues many collaboration initiatives.
Let's look at a couple of simple scenarios so that you see the power of Quickr. I think these will help in articulating the value proposition.
Scenario 1: Jim is an HR employee responsible for updating the company policy manual. This process involves making the changes in MS Word and then getting feedback from his colleagues before the changes are published.
Old Way: Jim has to locate the current, official policy document, copy it to his hard drive and open it in Word. He then makes the necessary modifications and makes sure he saves a new version on his computer. In order to collaborate with his colleagues and get their feedback, Jim then opens the Lotus Notes HR TeamRoom and creates a new document, attaching the Word file to it. This process, while not difficult, is inefficient and requires that Jim do a lot of task switching.
New Way: With Quickr, Jim's life will be a lot easier. If the HR policy exists in a Quickr site, he can open it directly from Word, make his changes, and save a new copy back to Quickr...collaboration in context.
Click to enlarge
Scenario 2: So much collaboration takes place today by people sending attachments back and forth in e-mail. This is extremely inefficient for many reasons. For users, attachments are the single biggest cause of being thrown into "mail jail" (i.e. exceeding quotas). In addition to the requirements from a storage perspective, there can be version angst...you find yourself wondering if the version you have is the most current one. With the integrated Quickr shelf in Notes 8, you can solve these problems. The Quickr shelf allows you to see all of your Team Places and access data from them directly from Notes. You can drag and drop attachments from an e-mail message into a Place. You can also drag an attachment out of a Place and into an e-mail message. Quickr is smart enough to add this attachment as a link rather than an actual attachment.
Click to enlarge
To help you remember to use your collaboration tools when you are sending e-mails, Quickr will detect if you have any attachments in your message and will prompt you to save them into Quickr. You can select the Place to move the attachments into and then the attachments will be replaced with links to the newly added Quickr content.
Many of the other integration points work in the same way, utilizing common actions that meld very nicely with the system we are interacting with (drag and drop into Quickr from Windows Explorer, for example).
In my experience as a collaborative technologies consultant, once you get people on board with the idea that collaboration is important and valuable for them, the next hurdle is getting them to actually use the tools. Lotus Quickr with the Quickr Connectors makes a very compelling case for simplifying adoption and helping your users get over that hurdle. I think we'll see this idea of collaboration in context start to embed itself in more and more collaborative tools and I am really looking forward to that experience. I know for me that working with Quickr has been a pretty enjoyable ride so far.
Yo, yo...welcome to my peeps...Andrea Waugh-Metzger is now blogging at Dominoblog.com. She is one of my colleagues, but way, way smarter than me, so you should definitely get over there and visit. Tell her I sent you and maybe I'll get some brownie points. :-D Peace out...
If there's a particular drum I bang over and over again, it's the "keep it simple, stupid" drum. This term has almost become a cliché , but hey, "if the shoe fits, wear it". (Oh sorry, that was bad...just couldn't help myself ;-)
Anyway, when I was doing project work, I was always the guy advocating for people to "take it slow", "do things in stages", "no big bangs", "Amazon wasn't built in a day", etc., etc. I believe that quick, iterative steps yield better results, less bugs and get you to the end goal faster than big, monumental projects. The problem, it seems, is that companies like to have big, monumental projects. The bigger the company, the more monumental the projects seem to be. I think this is dead wrong. It's not the way our brains work, it's not the way people are most efficient and looking at the abysmal failure of so many IT projects, it sure doesn't seem to be the way to run a business. So why do we keep doing it? I guess if I knew the answer, I'd be running a shop somewhere instead of pushing software. :-)
In my "To Read" stack of magazines, I recently came across a jewel of an article in the April 2008 issue of Baseline. The cover story in this issue was a piece outlining the failure and eventual redemption of Symantec's new ERP implementation. A classic "big, monumental project", it was undertaken without really understanding the needs of the very people that would be using it. As they found out, such an oversight almost completely crippled their business. In the end, what saved them was a new project that put the focus on the user experience.
I don't want to rehash the article here...I highly recommend you go and read it...but I do want to point it out as a prime example of a project gone wrong because the final end goal wasn't made clear. That final end goal always has to answer the question "Who is going to be using this and how will this project help them do their job". If you're not asking this question and getting the answer in your project, then you are doing your users a disservice. Keep their goals in the forefront...that's why you're there.
Unobtrusive JavaScript...You Should Totally Do This
In my JavaScript session at last year's version of LotusDeveloper (an excellent conference, by the way...you should go), I discussed the concept of unobtrusive javascript and showed several examples. Just as CSS was a blessing to us as we started to shift to the mindset of separating presentation from content (not so hard for us Notes folks really!), so is unobtrusive javascript the next stage of evolution. It's about separating behavior from content. If we can take out all the formatting junk from our HTML, can't we take all the javascript out as well? The answer is a resounding "yes" and it's a great ideal to strive for.
I haven't talked a whole lot about web design subjects here, since I thought the niche of focusing on the Notes client was more important, but this is a subject that I might just tackle more in future installments. In the meantime, there are a lot of good resources out there to bring you up to speed on the concept. I'm not really sure if this practice has caught on in the Domino world, or even how prevalent it really is in the broader world of web design, but it's a technique that I've found has a lot of merit.
To get you started, here's a nice little example. It's very simple, but walks you through the process of making a page of unobtrusive script. Check it out and see what you think. I'm interested if it will change the way you approach your code.
Besides Lotus Notes, the other software product I'm most passionate about is MindManager from Mindjet. I've talked about it a little in the past on this blog, but for those unfamiliar with this product, it is an tool for creating mind maps on your computer rather than with paper, pens, crayons, etc. It has a UI that is as simple to use as paper, but with very powerful features that provide results you couldn't expect to achieve in the analog realm. I just upgraded to the new version the other day (thanks, Gaelen!) and you can expect a full review coming soon. The short take is that MindManager 7 rocked my world, especially with the new Ribbon UI.
I was recently featured in Mindjet's Customer Vignette section and wanted to point out that even when talking about another product, I'm spreading the Notes love. Not only did I mention using the Lotus Notes client in one of the interview questions, but I also gave them my Notes URL mind map as a sample of how I use MindManager.
Ah...Lotus Notes and MindManager...two great tastes that taste great together. :-)
Simulating Fieldset and Legend In The Notes Client
You may have noticed that the signal-to-noise ratio of UI posts on this blog has been rather low the last few months. This is, unfortunately, a bi-product of my current job at IBM. While I'm cranking away on a development project, the ideas are coming fast and furious. When I'm not, it's much harder to come up with ideas. It's really the fact that solving a business problem spurs creativity, while actively trying to come up with new ideas as you stare at a blank page doesn't result in much useful stuff to share. I don't really create applications in this new gig, thus no great interface revelations. I do know that I really miss it, however, and I expect I'll find a way back. In the meantime, I am trying to squeeze in the occasional work on some personal projects, but my free time to do this seems to be ever shrinking. Please stick around, because I do have some ideas to share as soon as I can get around to fleshing them out. I've actually got several draft posts partially done, so it's just a matter of getting away from the wife, kids, horses, chores, work, et. al and doing it! ;-). That said, here's a cool tip but one that is simple too...my favorite kind!
In the HTML world, a Fieldset allows you to group thematically related fields on a form together with a visual line bordering them to denote their relationship. In addition, you can use the Legend tag to give the Fieldset a title. These tags serve two purposes in that they visually show the relationship between the items and they make the form more accessible. Here's an example:
Of course you could get more fancy with CSS, styling both the Fieldset and the Legend.
So...a pretty simple construct, but I think you can see it's usefulness. Great...that's fine for the web, but how do we do it in the Notes client? Actually, there are a whole bunch of ways to accomplish this using standard Notes dev techniques. The two I've found most useful for my purposes are to either create a graphic for my Fieldset and Legend so that they look exactly like I want them to OR use a...wait for it...wait for it...LAYER! :-)
Let's look at the graphic approach first. In your favorite graphic editing program, create the top of the Fieldset with the Legend. Make sure to match the color of the border and text with the visual theme of your form. You should get something that looks like this:
Now go to Domino Designer and create a table that will serve as your Fieldset. Paste the graphic into the first row of the table (you might need to merge cells first) or paste it directly above the table (I'll do that for this example). In order to make everything line up, first size the table so that it matches the width of your Fieldset graphic. Then, turn OFF the top border of the table. Finally, set the Picture properties of the Fieldset graphic so that the Text Wrap is "Don't wrap, align bottom". This will drop the graphic so it fits snugly against the table, appearing to complete the border and giving you a Fieldset with a Label.
If you like using layers like I do, then you'll find that they are an even easier way to add a simulated Fieldset to your form. To do this, you simply need to create a new layer and position it on the top line of your table so that it looks like a Fieldset. This allows for easier maintenance as well, since if you want to change the label, you simply type the new value in the layer. You can also resize it, change the color, etc.
There are other ways to approach this idea as well. Daniel Soares suggested creating an inner table within an outer table. The inner table would take care of the formatting for your field elements and the outer table, which would be a single cell, would contain a background image. This background image would be the entire Fieldset border. You could make some fancy effects with this one.
If I did a poor job explaining this or if you'd just like to explore it in more detail, I've put a Notes client database out there for you to download. There is a single form in the db that shows examples of each of these techniques and you can deconstruct them to see how they are put together.
A few months back, a little site called Planet Lotus appeared and took us all by storm. If you follow Lotus blogs at all, you know about it already, and if you're like many of us, you probably visit it first thing in the morning or several times throughout the day to see what the Lotus Community is up to. Well the incredibly cool guy behind Planet Lotus is also one hell of a dad and is doing something to help his son and indeed society in general. So, please, if you are a fan of Planet Lotus, head on over to charity.planetlotus.org and do what you can to help Yancy's cause. Thanks...you guys rock!
Hi, everybody...Hi, Doctor Nick! (Whoops...another out of place Simpsons reference there)
Bruce was looking for a web conferencing service today and although I got to him too late, I wanted to share a cool alternative for those of you looking for a "personal" web meeting space.
The service is called Dimdim and it's billed as "the world's free web meeting where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees." Pretty cool stuff.
Of course, I still think Lotus Sametime and Sametime Unyte are THE tools for true business web conferencing and unified communications, but if you are looking for a no-cost service that will work great for your personal needs, go ahead and check out Dimdim.
I mean, come on...they get points in my book just for a cool name! :-)
Besides being a snappy dresser, Lotusphere Comes To You is so nice, it's taken time out of it's busy schedule to make life easy for you. Why leave the comfort of your easy chair when you can get a private showing while still wearing your jammies? For details, see below. This public service message is brought to you from the fine folks at LotusUserGroup.org.
LotusUserGroup.org is hosting Lotusphere Comes to You Online. This is an online event series featuring updated presentations from Lotusphere 2008 and even one or two new sessions. Designed to bring anyone who couldn't get to Orlando the critical information and the excitement they missed, this series will help you get more from your existing IT investment and boost collaboration across your enterprise.
The first of the series is:
Lotus Notes and Domino — The Road Ahead Presenter: Ed Brill, Business Unit Executive, WW Lotus Notes/Domino Sales Leader
How do we top Lotus Notes and Domino 8? Learn about the roadmap for 2008 and beyond, giving you a glimpse into planned innovations for upcoming releases, intended to reduce the cost of managing and storing your email, offer additional deployment options, and drive continued optimization of employee productivity. We'll describe important initiatives designed to reduce the costs of running Lotus Domino in many areas including security, identity management, directory openness, storage reduction, administration, quality of service, 64 bit support and web application server. You should leave this session with a clear understanding of the Lotus Notes and Domino strategy and future roadmap, to help you plan future deployments.
April 28, 2008 IBM Lotus Sametime Strategy and Roadmap: The Future of Unified Communications and Collaboration Presented by: Dave Marshak
May 12, 2008 The Business Value of Web 2.0 and Enterprise Portal Solutions Presented by: Jon Raslawski
May 19, 2008 IBM Lotus Connections and Mashups Presented by: Suzanne Minassian and Nicole Carrier
May 26, 2008 IBM Lotus Domino Designer Presented by: Maureen Leland
June 23, 2008 Desktop of the Future Presented by: Ed Brill and/or Alan Lepofsky
All the Lotusphere Comes To You Online sessions are free but require pre-registration. Sign up for as many as you like. You have to be a LotusUserGroup.org member, but membership is free.
Click the icon to be notified automatically every time I add a new post.
Search
Disclaimer
Since I work for Big Blue now, I'm compelled to say “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.” So there...
