Jan 152008
 

We here at SNAPPS has outlined plans to convert our entire line of AnyPlace™ for Quickr and QuickPlace to free licenses.

From Rob Novak’s blog:

Our products, especially AnyPlace Administrator, have been an entry point for many enterprise customers who have then become high-value consulting or development clients. Making the AnyPlace products free brings down the price barrier to realizing the value of these powerful tools, while expanding the reach of the SNAPPS name throughout IBM’s Lotus Quickr customer enterprises. Our goal is to expand the use of these products by 50 times their level as paid licenses. It’s about giving back, and it’s about ubiquity.

The four products are detailed on the SNAPPS website under “Solutions”, and have trial versions available.

At the same time we are announcing the immediate availability of fully supported subscription versions of the template applications for as little as $1 per user, in addition to new support options for the free versions.

A subscription entitles the subscribing company to benefits usually associated with fully paid licenses – for a fraction of the price – including:

  • Unlimited technical support, a helpdesk and escalation system
  • A new blog, wiki and documentation site combined with the template website
  • Guaranteed first release with new features, and a feature request mechanism
  • Guaranteed compatibility with new IBM Lotus Quickr versions within 30 days of their release

Subscription pricing is between $1 and $2 per user, per application, per year depending on the number of subscription units purchased. Custom subscription options are available for modified or combined templates, and QSite is priced at 2x the normal subscription price (QSite includes 10 applications in one).

Is that not great news just before Lotusphere?

Sep 282007
 

Troy & Viktor at g33k in Stockholm, SwedenTroy Reimer and I spoke for a couple of hours in front of 30 or so geeks Tuesday night in Stockholm, Sweden. Ekakan sponsored the event and Troy and I had a great time. We spoke about the Lotus Quickr Templates, you can download them here, and about workflow lotusscript, JSON and the Dojo Toolkit. It was great to see some familiar faces from past years when I was working in Sweden but also several from Lotusphere.

Viktor and Troy at Icebar, StockholmBefore the event they took us to Icebar Stockholm. They made an entire bar in ice from the northern part of Sweden. That’s right, they ship the ice down and build the walls, bar and seats out of pure ice.

The pictures are taken by Joachim Dagerot who also together with Niklas Waller has blogged about the event.

Jul 172007
 

It’s been nearly four months since IBM said “go” on the Lotus Quickr template project that you’ve read so much about on my and other blogs. Today, after an exhausting but very rewarding development cycle, we get to say “go” too. Code was complete June 29 (as promised to IBM), testing on Lotus Quickr Gold code was July 2-6, last week was CU and finishing the download system, and this weekend we put the final touches on and did a limited test with IBMers. Then yesterday we knocked out one last bug in the download system after flying to London for Collaboration University this week.

In these last months I and the team at SNAPPS had a lot of fun developing these templates. I learned new code and got to dig really deep into the Dojo Toolkit which, you know by now, I really like.

So after all that we’re happy to announce that the SNAPPS templates for Lotus Quickr are ready for you. Make absolutely sure you get the documentation, read it, and install and sign the prerequisite files. Then go have some fun!

I will continue posting on developing and digging deeper into both Lotus Quickr as well as the Dojo Toolkit code.

QuickrTemplates.com

Jul 052007
 

It is finally here, the Grand Finale! The eleventh and last Lotus Quickr template demo is here: QSite. Rob Novak puts it like this:

Now this is where I usually ramble on about the features and functions, their applicability to a business situation, and how wonderful your life is going to be as soon as we have the download database all ready. But to do so here would just detract from the big kahuna surprise we have in store for you with QSite. It’s been kept such a secret that my team and Satwik were the only ones who “really” knew what was coming…

Head straight to the demo of QSite and I’ll see you at Collaboration University!

UPDATE! I have added links to all the demos on the right side, so if you’ve missed any go check them out.

Jul 042007
 

The next to last Lotus Quickr Template demo is: QActivities. In QActivities, we have strived for a combination of an approachable, professional user interface and a base level of integration with Lotus Connections. Specifically, QActivities integrates with the Activities server, allowing the user to add any page in the Lotus Quickr place to an activity on the Activities server. This becomes very powerful when combined with the Lotus Notes 8 client and the embedded Activities sidebar. You can add a Quickr page to an activitiy, see it immediately in your Notes client, and launch the Quickr page form the context of the activity. Simple but very cool and effective and dare-I-say-it-again contextual collaboration.

In addition to a refreshed UI accomplished almost entirely with CSS – hence much faster – we’ve added some great features to Lotus Quickr like a list of the last 10 updated documents, a member list that searches for documents created by the member when clicked, and a nice little tab with place statistics!

You can see the demo of QActivities here.

Jul 032007
 

The eighth Lotus Quickr Template demo has been posted. This time it’s QIssues.

Similar in feel to QSurvey, the form creation process is very simple. A floating window lets you build questions for your issue form and submit them to build the form. There are a couple new types of questions not found in QSurvey, a member list and date control. Once the questions are built, you can move them around, define a layout (1, 2, 3 columns or a wizard) and – this is key – decide right at the form what kind of workflow to put submissions through. And of course, using the workflow engine we’ve bundled with several templates, you can define that workflow yourself.

You can see a demo of QIssues here.

Jul 032007
 

From Rob Novak’s blog:

For the seventh Lotus Quickr Template demo, you’ll see QMeeting, an organizational and planning aid for complex meetings. Not the 2-hour staff meeting or the 90-minute group conference call, those are better handled with your Notes Mail and Quickr’s native group calendar, respectively. The meetings that benefit most from QMeeting are those that make you tear your hair out – multiple agenda items, planned breaks, different people responsible for each agenda item, multiple electronic resources (attachments), and a timeline to keep. Examples of such meetings? Shareholder’s meetings. Conference tracks. Corporate retreats. Financial reviews. The big ones!

QMeeting lets you distribute responsibility for agenda items to individuals, or lets you manage agenda items as discrete elements as a proxy for an outsider, or even create them on the fly. Agenda items are the building blocks of complex meetings, and each can have its own “Owner”, resources, rich text, and set of appropriate attachments. So if John is in charge of Finance, let John manage the agenda item for the financial report!

The meeting manager – a person who puts together the meeting agenda – can then easily assemble an electronic meeting agenda that automatically computes time slots, adds breaks and lunches, and even includes online meetings. If someone hasn’t completed their agenda item, it can be added easily. Once the meeting agenda is built, it has direct links to each agenda item, and (this is cool) direct links to each attachment. This document becomes the easy access point for all meeting participants. In practical use, it can be projected and run by a person when the meeting is live in person, and used online when the meeting is managed via teleconference or Sametime. It becomes a nice adjunct to online meetings by storing all meeting “artifacts” in one place.

Go have a look at the QMeeting demo.

Jul 032007
 

Rob Novak has posted the sixth Lotus Quickr Template demo: QAnnounce. From Rob’s blog:

QAnnounce lets you put structure around the creation, edit, approval and archive process for any kind of “official” communication. The form is fairly simple, with the kind of metadata fields you would expect – a distribution date, a field to track the disposition of the document, and (something new) a field to track comments as each edit is made, and display them in an audit trail along with the name of the person making the edit, the disposition at the time, and the date and time the edit was made. Of course, we’ve included some flexible views to let you categorize the communications by disposition or category.

Go have a look at the QAnnounce demo here.

All the demos are now done. Check back here today for the postings!

Jun 202007
 

We have uploaded our fifth demo of our Lotus Quickr Templates: QIdeas.

Rob Novak:

The fifth Lotus Quickr template demo introduces QIdeas, an innovation and idea management template that probably has more uses than I’ve imagined for it. Visualize if you will the free-flowing nature of a wiki where revisions and enhancements to a concept and content are able to be made as simply as clicking “New Version”. Then to this collaborative model add the blog-like ability to let others comment on each version of the evolving document (idea in our case), and — this is key — making sure the comments are maintained in the context of the version with which they are associated. Not a free-flowing discussion about all versions, but very specific comments about the current version. An author might choose to incorporate those comments or not, but there is a record of when and by whom they were submitted.

Now that we’ve combined the concepts of a blog and wiki to collaborate, we have a platform on which to evolve business ideas and innovations to the point where they are worthy of submitting to some authority or group for “approval” or “review”. This is where the business construct of a workflow comes in, but it has to be flexible, manageable by the business user, and be able to be initiated at any time and not based on pre-set rules. The custom workflow engine we’ve built for these templates does just that, as you’ll see in this and four other template demos.

Enjoy this 17 minute demo of QIdeas

Jun 192007
 

The fourth Lotus Quickr template demo is posted. This time it is QProject, which contains enhancements to the tasks and notifications in Lotus Quickr, introduces a concept of overall and cross-project status, and implements an enhanced AJAX Gantt chart for viewing tasks and their relationships to other tasks. Relationships? Yes, with QProject you can declare task predecessors and dependencies! One to one, one to many, however you like. The major features include the ability to set these dependencies, visualize them through the Gantt chart, receive consolidated overdue task notifications, and (my favorite) automatically push out dates when a predecessor is completed late. Not that this ever happens, but…

The 16.5-minute demo can be seen here: QProject demo

Enjoy