DominoKeys.com

I did my first internal demo of Quickr today at the office. I pulled a group of people that regularly work with customer projects AND are visionaries to show them this tool. I started the demo saying that our I.T. group feels like we’re sitting on a product that can do a lot of good in the company and solve some problems – however, we don’t have a clear idea of how/where/when to integrate this product into the business.

A half-hour into the meeting, they understood exactly what I meant.

Quickr gives us the ability to set up places where we can collaborate around projects. Its easy to understand attaching files (although check-in/check-out is going to be a training point, since lots of people haven’t done that before). Its easy to understand a group/project calendar. The ability to drag-n-drop onto Windows Explorer or the Notes 8.0.1 sidebar (which prompted me to revisit the “we’re not upgrading yet because… blah blah… performance is poor… blah blah blah”) is all very cool and handy stuff! And the task list is much easier to deal with than anything we have today. But here’s what we all felt were issues to consider further:

• It looks really flexible – which is good, and yet creates a training problem if you’re applying it to a process you want to be consistent. Action item: look further into “Custom” places.
• Quickr entry/personal is a PERFECT way to build viral adoption. However, the lack of folders will kill it before it starts. Too many people have FINALLY found a way to structure their file system using a folder organization that makes sense. Not having that means Quickr entry will be seen as a down-grade.
• It would have been really nice to have some strong interoperation with Notes accessible to developers. We want… something… that would give us an easy way to integrate the hundreds of Notes apps we’ve built over time right into Quickr places.
• The navigation appears easy, but gets more complicated the longer you look. – I’m not sure if its terminology or what, but we kept expecting documents to be in one area, but found them in another.
• Custom forms, pages, etc. look really powerful but appear to be hidden within the system (and I had to hunt them down each time I wanted to create or edit one).

Of all the products I’ve dealt with lately, this continues to be the one that has the most promise. But cracking it into the organization continues to be really tough. We have a good set of action items out of this meeting to research further, and a list of projects that might fit into this initially. I’m anxious to see where it goes in the next few weeks!