10/24/2007

Go to page: 1 2  Printer Friendly Version

A few months ago I introduced you to IBM Lotus' new team room application called Quickr. Since that article, IBM Quickr Design Partner, SNAPPS has released 11 free templates to help you enhance your Quickr intranet. They are both open source, and free to download. Those two things make it really easy to justify adding functionality to your Domino-based Quickr environment.

What can you get?

The following templates are available:

QAnnounce

QContacts

QIdeas

QIssues

QMeeting

QPhotos

QPresent

QProject

QSurvey

QActivities

QSite

QAnnounce is a way for your company to manage announcements. Maybe HR wants to send different announcements to end users, or maybe Marketing wants to do their press releases here. QAnnounce allows you manage the life cycle of these documents using approval workflows and audit trails so you can see what updates have been made. It's fairly simple template, but one that could get a lot of use. It's also a good one to get your users comfortable with using Quickr.

QContacts

QContacts is simply a contact manager. It allows you to enter contact information and reference it within your Quickr team room. This could be handy if you have a customer facing team. They could track all of the customer contacts here without having to add them to your Notes address book or some other internal system.

A Contact in the QContacts template

QIssues

QIssues is a way for you to track issues during project management. You can easily create customized forms to track issues, and once you've created the form, you can use it to submit issues. You have some flexibility on what you want to do with it at that point. Submissions can sit in an Open Issues queue or you can have the workflow engine notify particular users when an issue is submitted.

I wouldn't substitute this for a help desk application, but it is a great way to track issues as they relate to particular projects.

QMeeting

QMeeting is a template that allows you to set up an agenda for an all-day type meeting. It allows you to set up agenda items and then tie them to the meeting. It automatically calculates times and lays out an agenda for you based on your choices. You can also drag-and-drop agenda items to have it re-calculate times on the fly. This is one I can see your IT and Marketing groups getting a lot of use out of.

QPhotos

QPhotos is a nice little photo repository. It differs from just uploading a picture (like you can do normally in Quickr) by allowing you to track the name of the photographer, as well as categorize and tag your photos. It also shows thumbnails and can be customized easily to show what you want to track.

QProject

QProject is like the Quickr tasks mechanism on steroids. First you create a project and then attach tasks to that project. Where it differs from the built-in functionality that Quickr provides, is that you can make tasks dependant on each other, track overdo tasks and send email notifications, and refresh data quickly with AJAX controls. QProject also makes the GANNT charts a little more visually appealing via colors and arrows connecting dependant tasks.

Now QProject will not replace MS Project any time soon, but it's a great way to do small scale project and task management.

QIdeas

QIdeas is a template that allows your team to collaborate on ideas. It's kind of a combination of a wiki and a blog. Basically you post an idea, and then others can update it by clicking New Version. Once updates have been made, team members can comment on the idea's development in a blog-like fashion. Then, once an idea has been fleshed out, you can add workflow approval so the idea can be reviewed for approval.

Creating a new Idea with QIdeas

Go to page: 1 2  Printer Friendly Version