For the last couple of days I’ve been trying out IBM’s Lotus Quickr Services for Portal running on a Windows 2003 R2 Server.
For those of you who don’t know Quickr, it’s a ready-to-use web-based collaboration tool with features such as content libraries management, team places where project teams can convey information and documentation of a given project, presence awareness (through Sametime), blogs and much more (check my link above for more detailed info from IBM). It’s also heavy on AJAX (they use the Dojo Toolkit) and implements a different approach to collaboration environments by introducing the infamous (or maybe not that so) concept of Web 2.0 interaction. This version I’m trying works based on Websphere Portal but you can also get it in a Domino “flavor”. Anyway, like said earlier, if you want to know more just follow the link.
So, I’ve installed and been using it for a couple of days and here are my thoughts so far:
Installation
I was kind of afraid this would be a bad experience. Not so much because the product had any bad references but because installing anything J2EE under Windows 2003 can be somewhat tricky. This was, all in all, a very pleasant surprise as all went smoothly from the WebSphere AS install to the Quickr install and config, including the installation and configuration of DB2.
First Impression
Installation went by and I didn’t even noticed it. So, I open my browser, create and account and I’m off to exploration land. First impression: nice color pallete 
The environment is inviting and pretty intuitive.
Another cool aspect is the Windows Explorer and Microsoft Office connectors. After install you’re able to access the content repository through your Windows Explorer.
Also, if you’re using Microsoft Office for content creation (like 95% of the computer world), you’ll also like the possibility of checking-in and out, as well as publish, documents from within your apps.
Another cool feature of this product is the ability to drop documents from your desktop into the browser and have them integrated in the library.
Down the line
After only a couple of days, there’s only this one thing that I found annoying and irritating: the ajax behaviours are somewhat insconsitent. Maybe that’s just because they ported Dojo 0.4 and since then it got 0.6 and a 1.0 releases.
All in all Quickr is a very interesting tools with a very interesting price. Expansion and scalling capabilities are very interesting too. I’m planning to write a couple of articles providing an in-depth look at the both front and back-office stuff so, stay tunned.
