Someone forwarded this blog posting to me.   I am not so sure I agree  with the sentiment. Quickr can be great, as long as you use it the way it was intended.  IBM/Lotus, if you look at the marketing material, position Quickr as a "document services layer".  It is intended to be used to facilitate collaboration. It was never intended to be a full fledged document mgt system or a web development framework.

nevermind.dk

I sat through a presentation at Lotusphere and a consultant talked about document mgt solutions in terms of four quadrants. In the upper left you had very simple low cost solutions that you could deploy quickly to do things like collaboration.  Google Docs for example.  Moving through the rest of the quadrants would take you on a journey from custom point solutions to full blown enterprise document mgt.

What makes Docova unique is that it fits in all of the quadrants, not just one or two.  The reason is that it has excellent out-of-the-box functionality, but also it is very easy to customize. You can leverage all those years of Domino experience to extend the out-of-the box  functionality to do many things.  It can become viral in your organization, over time becoming an EDMS.  

The next Docova User Group will take place online on March 9, 2010.
Reserve your seat to this web event here

During this 45 minute webinar, Learn how to execute your document and content management strategy leveraging your Lotus Domino investment.
Reserve your free seat here

There is that L word again.

Yep, its Valentine's day.  Just like last year at this time my mind drifts to thoughts of NSF.

Its been a so so year for the old girl.  Hah...funny to call her old considering that she just turned 20.  Things were pretty exciting after her birthday party last year.  XPAGES, DAOS and hooking her up with a new designer.   But it soon became apparent that although she had some pretty significant work done to her backend, not everyone liked the work she had done on her front end.  This is not about her being essentially flat.  Most have gotten used to that over the years.  The front part just seemed to slow down.  Maybe the first stages of Alzheimers or something.   She could spell better, and had some other cool things to offer, but it just seemed to take longer fo do some of the simple things. And the new designer, try and get him to do something quickly...sigh!  Blue and yellow...still not sure about that.  

This last year saw some trouble on the home front too.  I am not talking about her friends leaving her,  some of her relatives were making noises as well.  Uncle Bill had a bit too much one day and posted some things about her parents online.  Papa got pretty upset.  By the time her party rolled around this year they seemed to have patched it up, but there was no singing and dancing together like we were used to seeing in the past.  

As for me,  I am still a big fan.  Went out on a few dates with SP this year and it did not take to long to see there was a lot of baggage there.  NSF could be ready in 10 mintutes, but SP seemed to take forever to get her game on.  NSF knew about it, and did not really seem to care.  She knows most of us prefer a cheap date.

XOXO

www.ilovensf.com

IT being Information Technology.  You work in this business, you can forget what it is like for people who do not live and breath it every day.  People who are just trying to get their work done.

I remember sitting at the Lotusphere general session a few days ago, watching someone demonstrate how a user will access their own mashup from within a portlette while they collaborate via Quickr and Sametime with associates in the finance and legal teams....it made me chuckle.   How many users have you seen that would do that.....ever do that?   I just spent 15 minutes explaining to an end user where the task bar was on the Windows interface, what the desktop was, how to launch Internet Explorer from the Start button.   Mashups and portlettes...forget it.  To collaborate, if they are faced with these options, they are going to pick up the phone just like they have done for the last decade.

Sometimes we forget that not everyone in the world works for IBM, or Microsoft, or Google.  Not everyone spends 18 hrs a day in front of a computer and loves it.

If you turn converstations with customers away from technology, put it into a context the user understands, into a discussion of how your product can enable a business process or methodology, then the lights go on.  Everyone was excited.  

I know its hard. I am as guilty as the next, probably worse.  I am going to try to make this  my  New Years belated resolution.  Avoid the insanity of IT when talking to a customer.  Leave the Mashups for suppertime.

Since releasing our Network Scan Module for Docova, I have noticed that many of our clients are using it for applications other than scanning.  

Recently, one of our customers wanted a link on their intranet that would initiate a Help Desk request.  They use Docova for capturing and processing help desk tickets.  This is a simple Docova Custom Doctype that has fields that capture the details for the support call and an appropriate workflow.   Creating the ticket is simple,  as the document creation is just a  URL you can paste behind a button on the intranet page.  However if you link directly to Docova, the user needs the Docova Web Components installed on the local machine making the request.  Not everyone in the company has a Docova license.   Some of the requests come from users working from home on their personal computers.   We had discussed doing some customization to get around this, but it never made it to the quote/budget phase.  

This customer purchased the Docova Scan Module, for entering in scanned documents from a network scanner.   What they quickly realized is that they could use the same application for processing the Help Desk tickets via the intranet.    They called the other day, proud as punch, saying they automated the help desk ticket entry via the intranet themselves.

What they did  was simply capture the support request on the intranet and mailed it into the Docova Scan Module.  The scan module converts the email to a Docova Document type, in this case the Help Desk Ticket, and drops it into a designated folder.  The body of the email goes into the body of the ticket, the username is populated, and the workflow kicks off to alert the appropriate support staff.  

No need for any Docova client software.  No customization required.  15 minutes and done.