Lotus Rock Star

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I'm pleased to introduce (using the latest version of Lightbox) a little high-impact pro-bono project we've done for IBM to support BDD (Business Development Day) at Lotusphere 2008. If you're an IBM Business Partner, you know that BDDay is a very valuable pre-conference day full of business and product sessions designed to help partners succeed. I've been fortunate to be a part of BDDay sessions for four years myself, and have attended for several years prior.

But one thing partners have never had was a central location for the BDDay sessions - to download, review in advance or share with their teams. They have been available, but only from the speakers directly. As you can imagine, that can get a bit logistically challenging when you have 1,500 partners attending 30+ sessions!

Well this year, IBM called and asked for some ideas on how to use Quickr for this distribution. I thought - how about more than just a repository? So after throwing out some ideas on how to make it more collaborative, Troy Reimer (SNAPPS Quickr guru) went to work. He finished in a week or so, and very soon IBM will roll out the BDDay Quickr - designed by SNAPPS - with some interesting features.

A nice landing page will have information about BDDay, a schedule, and the keynote speaker's bio. Then, there will be views of presenters and presentations. The presenter view shows names, photos, and some contact info. The presentations pull in presenter data with Ajax calls to populate the photo, bio, and contact info. Kada Sigl and Andy Cussen, BDDay track managers, will be loading the presenters and presentations in advance. Then it gets fun.

When IBM rolls out the Quickr place to BDDay registered attendees, they will receive access to the place with the presentations. They can be downloaded, of course...but also, attendees can ask questions about the slides or content in advance. When a question/comment is registered, the attendee has the option to subscribe to the presentation's comment thread. Any time a comment or question is left, the presenter automatically receives an email with a link - and if the attendee has subscribed, they also receive an email. The notifications have the effect of drawing interested parties into the conversation. A side benefit is that if a question or comment points out a topic that should really be covered, the speaker has time to add some content before going onstage in January. Finally, the Quickr will remain available after Lotusphere for a limited time, so attendees can download the presentations they want, and continue to provide feedback.

I've prepared a slide show illustrating some of the screens in the BDDay Quickr system. Expect to see more of this type of simple, high-impact Quickr application from the SNAPPS team soon.

Tomorrow: Integrating Quickr and Lotus Connections...