Lotus Rock Star :: The Realm of Possibilities

Category Projects Quickr Domino Sametime

When discussing my next newsletter topics with Viktor and a few others, it occurred to us that every year, we do thousands of hours worth of high end design, customization and consulting that go largely unnoticed by anyone other than the client who benefits from it. So in the spirit of case studies, but with total anonymity, we're going to write short blurbs about the kinds of things we do with Quickr, Sametime, and Domino in the newsletter and sometimes on the blogs. In that vein, here is one of our current projects at a very high level:

Client:
Major US Advertising Firm

Project:
Quickr Theme and Blog Enhancements

Project Size:
Small

Features:
This client is in the advertising business, so appearance and branding are core to their outward appearance and client interactions. So first order of business was a custom theme - which if you've worked with custom themes, got harder in Quickr 8.1, our target version. After a good deal of CSS injection and pushing pins into the JavaScript voodoo doll, however, Viktor produced a very nice theme. Lessons learned in this exercise - don't assume things are as they always were, really know CSS well before working with a moderately difficult theme, and never, EVER try to do theme work without FireFox and Firebug installed.

Once the theme passed muster with our client, they asked for a few more enhancements. In the blog template, some features are disabled - for instance drag and drop to Library folders. They wanted this enabled, so we decided the best approach was to incorporate the blog design elements into a standard place, then make it a placetype (template). So far so good - but then we added the following features:

--Categories on blog postings, with navigation by category at the main level. Categories build on each other.
--Tags on blog postings, with a tag cloud generated at the main level. Tags are available from a picklist as they're built.
--"Pinning" of blog postings - like you sometimes see on forums - so certain posts stay at the top until an expiration date. A hybrid model.
--Last but not least, the ability to see comments with an Ajax "Show/Hide" at the main level, without having to open the entry, making it easy to read comments for many entries at once.

This list of features enhanced the standard blog template into a hybrid Quickr template that will help this organization meet its client communications goals, providing value for the company and its clients with only moderate customizations.

The end.

So - in some cases, I'll be able to post code snippets for these stories, in some I won't. But the idea is to get you thinking about how Quickr, Sametime and Domino can be extended beyond the base installations and freely available templates. That said I have two questions for you - is this valuable, and what other information would grab your interest? I have years and years of value-ridden project descriptions.

Next time, if it seems worth it, I'll discuss an application we built to avoid obsolescence in the documents posted to a Quickr/Domino application. It helps the client keep up with their need to balance regulatory compliance, "fresh" content, and document retention policies. If it's not worth it, I'll probably just post pictures of dogs.

Comments

1 - I think this type of post is excellent, and would like even more details. We are currently endeavoring to build multiple Quickr places with custom features and find it to be quite daunting at times. It seems that the simplest of changes can very often "break" things and cause you to start over. It's nice to learn what types of customizations are indeed possible and even nicer to know how to do it. Thanks for sharing - looking forward to CU '08.

Posted by Larry Cannon At 07:14:30 AM On 07/17/2008 | - Website - |