02/25/2010

Alright already, we'll do it. But just for a few. And on our turf.

QuickImage Category SNAPPS Quickr Training
For ten years, I've taken the same question about once a week. "Do you guys do training?"

Of course we have Collaboration University and the new Webinar Series, UKLUG, IamLUG, TriLUG, MWLUG, NLLUG, ILUG, UG, UG, UG...but while those are (excellent) lecture and demo style training, what these folks want is to have an expert like Viktor, Troy, Jerald, Julian or myself (a stretch, but I do architect great solutions once in a while) come to them and learn from the experts. Side by side, hands on. It's never been our business model. But after ten years and nobody really doing this at the level we know can be done, I am giving in.

SNAPPS will be delivering a Lotus Quickr Development Boot Camp, three full days of hands-on workshop style training for developers of all skill levels but geared to the company running Quickr and wanting to take it from out-of-the-box to the next level and start getting real returns on the investment. We spent the last month developing a syllabus, identifying a local Kansas City venue and have decided to go ahead - for 12 people. TWELVE.

Registration opens today. The Boot Camp is April 12-14, with an optional half day on the 15th. All the details are here. Hope you can make it, as one of the 12. We're buying lunch, the hotel is $99, and if you fill all the slots, I'll buy everyone a nice dinner one of the nights (you heard it here, I'm not making this offer on the site).

If this works, maybe we'll repeat it in another city. We'll see...

I do realize that with only 12, there are excellent jokes about Cylons, disciples, and WW2 movies in there. I'm working on it.

02/19/2010

As our SnappFiles press release hits the street, planning more fun stuff for Monday and Tuesday

Category Quickr SnappFiles iPhone iPad MacWorld
Here's the full text of the Press Release we issued earlier today, and is making its way across the Apple and Web-centric online publications. Those who have been following me on Twitter have heard about the soft launch after Lotusphere, this is the official release of SnappFiles, the story of how it was born and an announcement of support for Filenet P8 ECM in addition to both flavors of Lotus Quickr! Oh yeah, and it's free. More coming soon (Monday and Tuesday)...

SNAPPS and IBM Work Together to Bring IBM Lotus Quickr and Enterprise Content Management Products to iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad

OVERLAND PARK, Kan., Feb. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- SNAPPS, a long-time IBM Advanced Business Partner and new Apple Development Partner, identified an opportunity for synergy between the enterprise business software giant IBM and the hip, cool consumer-focused Apple and decided to actively link them together. The first offering, SnappFiles, demonstrated by IBM at MacWorld in San Francisco last week, is a free app available on the Apple App Store that delivers secure access to and collaboration on corporate documents stored in IBM Lotus Quickr or Filenet P8 ECM systems. With work underway to support other IBM ECM systems such as IBM Content Manager and Lotus Connections Files next month, SnappFiles is designed to be a single point of entry into corporate document management systems.

"We've designed complex business systems, workflows, and critical customer-facing applications in our tenure working with IBM products," said Rob Novak, president of SNAPPS. "Bringing these processes outside the corporate firewall and into the hands of Apple customers is a natural progression. We have several applications in development, and plan to bring our years of experience to bear on real business solutions for Apple customers."

Inspiration for SnappFiles came from the most unlikely place - unless you happen to have a teenager. Novak explains: "I was helping my 14-year-old son set up his new iPod touch six months ago and noticed he had a mesmerizing game called Paper Toss - the objective of which is to toss a crumpled piece of paper into an office trash bin. It occurred to me that if you could throw away paper on this cool device, why couldn't you retrieve documents securely?" The next day, SNAPPS joined the Apple Developer Program and started work on SnappFiles. Work on an iPad-optimized version is underway, since the form factor of the iPad will, according to Novak, make "corporate document management the killer business app for the iPad."

"SNAPPS' work with our open APIs has produced some very timely and astounding results for the iPhone and iPod touch," said Jeff Schick, Vice President of Social Software, IBM Lotus. "We're convinced that IBM's social software solutions and SNAPPS' innovation will produce some impressive apps for all the Apple devices."

SnappFiles is available now in the Apple App Store, free of charge. A professional version with enhanced capabilities is in the works, as are several other apps linking IBM's Lotus software to Apple devices. SNAPPS also develops custom solutions for Lotus Quickr applications and makes free templates available. For more information about SnappFiles, visit http://snappfiles.snapps.com, and for information about SNAPPS, visit http://www.snapps.com.

About SNAPPS

SNAPPS, an IBM Business Partner since 1997, has long focused on high-end collaboration strategy, development, and education. The company has advised progressive-thinking enterprises on deployment and design of collaborative business processes. SnappFiles is the first of many planned efforts to empower iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users with access to their business resources.

02/11/2010

Shocking new feature to the SNAPPS Quickr Templates

QuickImage Category Quickr QuickrTemplates.com QPhotos
As you're aware, SNAPPS developed a series of templates for IBM Lotus Quickr for the initial launch of Quickr 8.0 in 2007, and has maintained and improved on them through the years. We've fixed little bugs, added a feature or two, and even added a template. All for free use by IBM customers - and IBM themselves to help demonstrate the potential of Quickr when a little high-end development work is mixed with the powerful self-service collaboration platform. It's over at QuickrTemplates.com in case you've not been there.

From the first day we've taken feature requests large and small, and implemented many of them in point releases. Some large requests, however, we shied away from due to our own bandwidth, technical challenges, or our standard fallback position, "Hey! They're free!" One of those requests was for one of the more popular templates, QPhotos, and it was to be able to process more than one photo at a time. We understood, really, totally got it. We wanted that too. But the method in place of creating thumbnails on upload was intense. We were afraid - certain - that attempting a multiple-upload facility in ways we've done before would cause all manner of problems with memory, so we collectively said - you guessed it - "Hey! They're free!"

Ring, Ring
That is, until last October 30th. I had just finished a speaking engagement at the Netherlands Lotus User Group meeting and was visiting a client in Rotterdam. I was on the tram to dinner when my phone rang ("Damn! $1.29 a minute" was all I could think...). Jeff Schick, Vice President of Social Software for Lotus was on the line. OK, I'll spend the Euro.

So Jeff had this friend, you see, who would like - you guessed it - to upload multiple photos at once to QPhotos. As I entered my by-then-usual mode of discussing the technical challenges, he told me who the friend was.

Lights. Camera.
OK, got me. I can't decline an IBM exec's request for a celebrity user of Quickr, let alone one of our templates! So, back at the ranch in Kansas, we planned. We rewrote. We kicked things. We achieved room temperature nuclear fission. But we couldn't deal with the memory issue. Then it hit us - could we leverage Viktor's REST API work on PandaBear, the Adobe Air app for Quickr? And we were off. Three weeks later, we produced a solution that lets him upload 100+ photos at a time to QPhotos, with no code changes at all to QPhotos! And any updates to the Air app, of course, are automatically pushed down to the application. Air is like that. It's cool.

Here's how it works:

Viktor created a subset version of PandaBear cleverly named "PhotoLoadr for Lotus Quickr," which has one goal in life. Upload photos to a QPhotos place. Just like PandaBear, it lets you set up a connection to a server, browse places, pick one, then upload. Now - you have to know it's a QPhotos place, we didn't make it idiot-proof. If you upload somewhere else it just, well, uploads. Once all the photos are uploaded (during which time you can go to lunch, get coffee, or play with your Twitter tweets), the PhotoLoadr app makes a silent call to an agent sitting in a new database you place on the server- brain child of SNAPPS' Jerald Mahurin - passing it the name of the place it just uploaded files to. The agent then takes over, processing each found photo one at a time, just like it used to manually, but in a batch mode. After a few seconds, a minute, whatever, you have all your photos uploaded, thumbnails created, and ready for the much faster process of just filling out metadata. That's still one at a time until a future Quickr version which will accept metadata through the REST APIs, but that's another story. Believe me, it makes a major difference in overall time! Our benchmark tests on a crappy server give us 8-10 images processed per second.

Shhhhhhh...
We tested it, fixed a couple bugs, delivered it, and silence ensued. The kind of silence that makes you wonder if you crashed a server, or if everything's just going OK. But it turns out it was just holiday and LS-prep silence. On Tuesday night at Lotusphere I saw Jeff in Kimonos, said hello, and had my answer. The hug and 10x repeated "Thank You!" said it all. He even did the "we're not worthy" bow. How embarrassing. Apparently, it's working great and while we (nervous developers) still have scalability reservations, they've been uploading in batches of more than 100 going gangbusters.

Very pleased that this all worked out, so much so that I'm happy to be placing the code on QuickrTemplates.com for free today, for all to enjoy.

Oh - I almost forgot!

That friend of Jeff's, Notes user, Quickr fan, and QPhotos fan, and who I got permission to reference just today, is radio personality Howard Stern.

Enjoy the code, folks!

02/04/2010

SNAPPS Quickr Templates updated with latest hotfixes, bug fixes, and some important site changes

QuickImage Category Quickr QuickrTemplates.com SNAPPS
In the hustle of pre-Lotusphere months, the team at SNAPPS still managed to take some support calls and put in a few fixes to the free templates for Quickr located at QuickrTemplates.com. But each time we rebuilt them, it seems a new hotfix came out that seemed really important, so we held off posting updates. Well the wait is over, as I've just posted updated versions of ten templates based on Quickr 8.1 HF 18 and Quickr 8.2 HF 9. These fix levels seem very stable, and are the latest, so you should update your templates (using the documentation) once you've updated your servers.

The fixes included in today's posting:
1. We have rewritten the enhanced view form to accommodate the xsrf security setting in qpconfig.xml (see comment #7) - meaning, you no longer have to turn it off for the templates to work. We are accessing and passing the security token properly, so the default installation of Quickr does not need to be modified. Once you update your places, you can turn this back on.
2. Same for the blog component in QSite, which experienced the same "you cannot take this action from this URL" issue when xsrf protection was on.
3. Fixed the QPhotos form which was updating the photo date field with each edit. Thanks to Jeff Schick, VP Social Software at IBM for reporting this to me at Lotusphere.
4. Fixed the Enhanced Task form in QProject for a customer-reported issue with LDAP names with a middle initial.
...and some other minor changes and fixes, mostly in QSite.

In addition to the fixes, we have made three changes to the site. First, we retired QActivities. Its functionality was based on Quickr 8.0 integration with Lotus Connections 1.1 - cool at the time, but really no longer relevant. It had some nice extra features like the 3-tab interface on the left, but would have required a lot of work to bring it up to speed. Second, we retired the Quickr 8.0/8.0.0.2 versions of the templates. We're just going to support 8.1 and 8.2 for now, and will make a determination about 8.1 after 8.5 ships in the second quarter, assuming we can update them all for 8.5. Finally, we removed the separate downloads for source code, at least temporarily. All of the design is open and can be accessed from the individual places, and we had a lot of duplication where the same form was used in seven places for instance. We're working on a plan for re-posting the source in a way that is easier to follow.

In the coming days, you can expect some more changes and a new addition (enhancement) to one of the templates based on your feedback and some work we did to enhance it for a celebrity user! As soon as I'm permitted, I will tell you all about it...you will be shocked, to say the least.

Have fun!

02/03/2010

Quickr 8.2 hotfix 9 is out - go get it

Category Quickr
The latest hotfix for Quickr 8.,2 is available on IBM Fix Central, and while it addresses a small number of issues it's recommended to update right away. If you're using our PandaBear, Flippr, or SnappFiles clients, it's even more important. Here are the included fixes:
BBAR826LEU Via the Rest API, using the pagesize parameter without using the page parameter may crash the Domino Server.
JRIE7YXGDM The Notify context menu option does not work for documents in a workflow.
XHKG7CG5GU After adding a local group to a room’s security, clicking the Member Profile of the group gives an invalid Member Profile.
RALF7ZPQYQ Usage Statistics page does not show all places for a user logged in as a Super User.
KABS7U6VGX Mail not sent to next approver when using a Workflow form from Connectors.


Calendar

Rock On With Me and SNAPPS

Join me and the great team at SNAPPS at these upcoming events:

IamLUG
I am Lotus User Group - August 2-4, St. Louis

Collaboration University
London and Chicago - September 21-23 and 27-29 respectively. That's right, London goes first!

The events have very limited capacity so signing up as soon as possible is recommended. Hope to see you there!

Be With the Band

Follow me on Twitter!


Opt in to receive Rob's semi-regular newsletter about Quickr, Sametime, Free Stuff and Conferences. Just enter your email address below, you can unsubscribe at any time.

Subscribe to my newsletters...
Email:

On With The Show

Here is a list of the SNAPPS templates for Lotus Quickr and other free resources on QuickrTemplates.com:
Templates:
QContacts
QIdeas
QIssues
QMeeting
QPhotos
QPresent
QProject
QSite
QSurvey

Utilities:
AnyPlace SiteMap
AnyPlace ServerMap
AnyPlace Designer for Dreamweaver

Free Apps:
PandaBear: Cross-Platform File Management
Flippr: Lightweight Quickr Admin Client
SnappFiles: iPhone Client for Quickr, Filenet, ICM...

Downloads: 104,397
Countries: 161
Read about the templates in Intranet Journal

Search

Googles

  • No Search Referers