If there’s one single product I’m most excited about from Lotus, its Quickr. Our company, like many others, can always benefit from better tools that help us collaborate with one another, and Quickr looks to be a strong tool to do just that.

However, our Quickr launch efforts have been slow-going to say the least. Previous versions had plenty of bugs that frustrated end-users (read: “gave them an easy excuse to give up”). The latest version has a MUCH improved UI. Yet, I just can’t seem to get past some of the goofy bits about the product that just shouldn’t seem to be there. For example:

• You can’t add users to a room when you use a Domino Directory only. You have to use LDAP. Yes, a Lotus product won’t use the Lotus address book to add new users to a room unless its via LDAP. — Now, that’s an easy fix and let’s face it, if you’re not using LDAP you probably should start. Still, its just goofy.
• The personal edition is there, but not. You can issue a console command to create personal spaces (or mass load them via an XML file) but there’s no UI piece to do so. Again, not a big deal, but goofy.
• The UI has been improved quite a great deal … but there’s still left-overs. You’ll run into a few areas where old (as in “from quickplace”) buttons still exist. Again, not a big deal, but its goofy considering how much the UI has been improved overall.

For the record, all of this has been confirmed through Lotus support.

None of this is going to prevent me from pushing Quickr as a possible tool in the organization. However, when you don’t dive into a product very far and start to run into odd things like this, its often not a good sign of things to come. — I’m just going to assume that the list above is the complete list of goofy things and move on.