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Customising IBM Lotus Quickr 8.1

September 2008

Looking under the hood of IBM’s maturing team space collaboration offering Quickr, we sought to put the newest version of the Web 2.0 flavoured software to the test.

It seemed to us that everyone is talking about the same stuff – installing Quickr, hosting it; or how well it integrates with Microsoft Office. That’s the simple part if you have any experience in IBM Lotus. But what about re-designing the user interface and increasing its usability? You can throw everything you have at Quickr in terms of getting it to integrate with your systems – but what is the point if your staff hate using it?

Early in 2008, our mission was to build a highly usable client extranet using the latest version of Lotus Quickr (8.1), giving our customers secure access to internal support systems and the latest Web 2.0 collaboration tools.

It made our Quickr go from this:

To this:

So read on below and see how we approached this important internal project.

With many of our Lotus team having extensive experience with Quickplace (Quickr’s predecessor) and its many customisation options, we first investigated the little extra’s that come out of the box. We wanted to know how we could tap into the Web 2.0 features including Blogs, Wiki’s, Team Space and Document Management functions. How would we utilise the new DOJO Ajax and REST services frameworks to build a better interface and more advanced functionality? How good is the ability to theme the Quickr so it looks and functions like a professional business tool that our clients want to use?

After a few short weeks and some long hours putting Quickr through its paces, we had enough to conclude that this was the solution for our secure client support extranet.

After some analysis to define requirements, we reviewed our current Notes-based Support Manager application and performed a usability analysis to identify areas of concern. This gave us all the ammunition we needed to create our Quickr. From this analysis, we identified seven main functions to integrate.

These were:
1) Personalised Client Homepage and Support Information area
2) Support Call logging and tracking (and workflow)
3) Discussion Forums
4) Technical Wiki and Knowledge Management tools
5) Document Libraries
6) Team Project Spaces; and
7) Reporting & Live Charting tools.

In short, our clients need to logon securely, log and track support calls, access Certus knowledge bases and get in-depth reporting of support calls. We already had a fully functioning Support Manager system, we just needed to ensure it met best practice usability standards and aligned with the Certus brand. The rest of the work involved plugging in third party products and using Quickr’s in-built functions to provide the rest of the functionality.

One major step was to design the new User Interface (UI) that our clients will access. This task was allocated to our resident UI experts, who came up with a prototype design which was put through its paces, usability tested and eventually approved. The interface is intuitive and adhered to all the latest web standards. The design was then converted to HTML, CSS and JavaScript elements ready to fit straight into Quickr using Quickr’s unique skinning integration (see below).

The challenging part and the bit that really put Quickr through its paces, involved integrating the rest of the functionality. Using iFrames as portals for the third party reporting products and development of the default Quickr functions for the rest, the end results for each of the functions required for the support extranet are shown in screenshots below.

Overall, we ended up creating a usable extranet for our clients and we have begun to get some great feedback. Certus will continue to think of new ways to use Quickr to suit other business processes and are happy to share our knowledge and aim to give our clients further value.

Screenshots


My Support Requests		Log a Support Call		Dashboard Reporting

Don't like the look of your Lotus Quickr?

If you don’t like the look of your Quickr, or would like to integrate functionality and are worried how it will affect usability, talk to Certus and we can investigate what your next steps should be.