EmailTide » SharePoint

New Quickr tool to aid in fight against SharePoint

sm — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:48:02 +0000

IBM released last week a new data migration tool intended to ease the movement of large amounts of data from existing content platforms such as SharePoint, Exchange Public Folders, Domino Document Libraries and other repositories (see coverage here, here and here). The tool also provides synchronization capabilities to enable platform coexistence during extended migration periods.

SharePoint has been a $1 Billion success for Microsoft although the platform is still struggling with enterprise-wide adoption due to integration and scalability issues. IBM Lotus is hoping to stop/slow SharePoint’s growth with Quickr’s enterprise grade scale (J2EE, WebSphere, DB2) and attractive web 2.0 features that tightly integrate not only with Lotus Notes 8 but also with Microsoft Office.

Enterprise customers will certainly benefit as this competition heats up.

Technorati Tags: quickr, sharepoint, content integration

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New Lotus Product Demo’s

sm — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 21:57:59 +0000

IBM has published a couple of short flash-based demos of the upcoming Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr products, to their public website. Both products were greeted with much fanfare during the introduction at IBM’s annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando, last January.

As a refresher: Lotus Quickr is positioned as the natural evolution of Lotus QuickPlace. By tightly integrating the existing document management capabilities of QuickPlace with the realtime collaboration features of Sametime and Notes, IBM is aiming to bring the product on par with archrival Microsoft SharePoint.

Lotus Connections aims to set the standard for a completely new class of solutions. Branded as: “The Industry’s First Ready-For-Business Social Software”, Connections is bringing behind-the-firewall a compelling mix of Web 2.0 apps found on the web as the likes of: LinkedIn, Blogger and del.icio.us.

Technorati Tags: lotus, quickplace, quickr, sametime, notes, sharepoint

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Offloading email attachments

sm — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:49:51 +0000

Email attachments, specifically the (ab)use of email as a document sharing system is a common concern amongst many companies coping with the constant increase in network traffic and storage demand. Stuart McIntyre on the Quickr blog highlights an interesting approach on how to lighten the email load by providing an intuitive integration point between email client and collaboration solution.

As Stuart points out:

“Of course there have been many attempted solutions to this, from formal document management or content management products at the high-end through to document libraries or fileshares at the low end, companies have tried really hard to deal with this issue. However, for many, the stumbing block has always been how to make the solution intuitive and easy to use for users in the context of their daily tasks.”

The Quickr / Notes connector will automatically prompt users to post the email attachment to a Quickr place while simply sending a link in the actual email. It is worth mentioning that Microsoft Outlook offers a similar feature for posting email attachments to SharePoint document workspace sites. This seemingly simple integration is the key to user adoption of these collaborative solutions.

Both IT and users win as storage demands for email will slow and users gain access to the features of a real document sharing system.

However, don’t forget that Quickr and SharePoint will require pro-active monitoring and management as well, as users can more easily create ad-hoc document sharing places. Usage monitoring combined with a sound document retention and archiving policy should be put in place right away to avoid the cost and headaches of a “clean-up” project later on.

Technorati Tags: quickr, quickplace, outlook, sharepoint, lotus, notes, email attachments

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