MOYER: Welcome to the first in a series of podcasts on team collaboration software from IBM. My name is Megan Moyer, and I'm the marketing manager for QuickPlace and Lotus Quickr.
To start off this series I'm pleased to have an expert on QuickPlace, IBM business partner and president of SNAPPS, Rob Novak. Hi, Rob.
NOVAK: Hi, Megan. How are you today?
MOYER: I'm great, thanks. How are you?
NOVAK: Great.
MOYER: Excellent.
How about if we start by you telling us about yourself and what you do at SNAPPS?
NOVAK: Okay. Well, just real quickly, as you mentioned, I'm the founder of SNAPPS. We're an IBM business partner in our 10th year working exclusively with Lotus software.
The company has been working primarily, even though we're small, with Fortune 1,000 IBM customers worldwide on getting the best return on investment from IBM software. And for the last six or so years, we've had a special focus on QuickPlace and team collaboration.
And for the last two years we've been the, what IBM calls the official design partner for QuickPlace, which means in addition to our being a business partner we have meetings with product management and development, we provide early input into the feature set, and in some cases, we even do some co-development with the development team at IBM including things like templates.
MOYER: That's great. It sounds like you've been working with us for a long time, and we're happy to have you as a teammate. What exactly are the templates that you're providing to QuickPlace customers?
NOVAK: Well, for QuickPlace customers what we decided to do last year was to illustrate some of the best practices in development and also illustrate some of the capabilities of QuickPlace with a little but of customization and a lot of innovation.
So we created three templates that were made available as Open Source and free just as an example months ago. And those three templates are QDOC, QWIKI and QBLOG. QDOC is an easy, Ajax enabled, very Web 2.0 document library for QuickPlace.
QWIKI and QBLOG are sort of self explanatory but for the uninitiated, QWIKI takes a QuickPlace server and a QuickPlace instance and allows you to use it for the creation of Wiki pages which have things like history and revisions for every page as it's being edited by multiple people. And QBLOG allows you to have a single individual or a team blog contained within QuickPlace.
MOYER: They sound really nice, and it sounds like they're pretty easy to use, too. Could you give me an example of how your customers are using the templates today?
NOVAK: Certainly. Well, of course, since they're Open Source we have, gosh, we have over 1,000 downloads of these templates. And what we have heard back from some of the folks who have downloaded them is that they are excited about having this kind of template available and are using them internally primarily for internal blogs and wikis.
Because of the nature of QuickPlace, especially in medium to large installations, the security and the deployment that they have in place with QuickPlace lends itself very well to using a blog and a wiki.
QuickPlace itself gives you these great facilities of member management and customization of the look and feel, but the functionality of the doc libraries, the wikis and the blogs, making it available to end users to manage, is something that our customers have really looked forward to and have been implementing for the past several months.
MOYER: That sounds like they're doing some pretty cool things with it.
NOVAK: Certainly are.
MOYER: So how would current QuickPlace customers get a hold of these free templates from you?
NOVAK: Well, that's pretty easy. Now, first off I should mention that it does require QuickPlace 7. We haven't gone and made them backward compatible to prior versions at this point, although it's not that difficult if a developer would want to do that.
But, that said, very simple to get a hold of them; they're downloadable absolutely free of charge. There's a link on the snapps.com Web site - that's SNAPPS with two Ps. Or, you can go directly to www.snapps.com/qptools. And that's the direct link to the page. But there will always be a link on the home page at snapps.com to the templates.
MOYER: Great. That sounds so easy. And as you know, there is the next release of QuickPlace, which is called Lotus Quickr 8. It is expected sometime in the mid year, and it's getting a lot of interest from customers and partners. Are you planning on providing templates for Lotus Quickr too?
NOVAK: Yes, as a matter of fact that's where some of the big news of the past couple of weeks comes into play. And I guess with this podcast we're announcing it, that we've entered into a contract with IBM not only to take these three document library, wiki and blog templates and actually incorporate them into Lotus Quickr 8...
We've worked with the development team to do that. But, also, we're developing 11 more Open Source templates that will be available for Lotus Quickr 8 for customers to download, just like these three, free of charge, going forward for the next two years.
MOYER: Well, that's excellent. What are some of the new templates that you've created for Lotus Quickr 8?
NOVAK: The new templates, beyond these three that are being incorporated into Lotus Quickr 8, they're...let's see, there's 11 of them, so I'll just highlight a couple of them.
They're all business focused; I should mention that. And they're all around a very unique and specific business activity. They're meant to be able to deploy separately or to be combined into a single QuickPlace.
So, that said, we have things like contact management, company announcements. We're actually developing a QuickPlace survey wizard to be able to do surveys within QuickPlace.
MOYER: That's neat.
NOVAK: Image libraries, and one of my favorites, which is collaborative presentation management where you can take a presentation, put it into a QuickPlace and then have a workflow that allows you to gather comments on a slide by slide basis from your team before taking that presentation back and making a final version of it.
MOYER: Oh, this is such great information, Rob, and thanks for announcing it on the podcast today. I know that our QuickPlace and our future Lotus Quickr customers will get a lot of value from those templates.
So before we end, I have a URL to give out. If you want more information on Lotus Quickr, just go to ibm.com/lotus/quickr. And Quickr is spelled Q-U-I-C-K-R. If you're interested in learning more about this new product there's a Webcast on the site, and it gives a great overview.
But if you're a QuickPlace customer and you're interested in the free templates that Rob talked about, please be sure to go to Snapps.com and take a look. Rob, thanks very much for your enthusiasm and for talking with me today. Let's definitely do this again real soon.
NOVAK: Thanks to you, too, Megan. That sounds great. [END OF SEGMENT]