Morpheus Blog

Important news this morning, with Websphere Portal Extend customers now officially entitled to run Lotus Quickr 8.0 rather than Quickplace.

Abstract
Lotus Quickr is now included with WebSphere® Portal Extend as a replacement for Lotus® QuickPlace®.

Content
Lotus Quickr is now included with WebSphere Portal Extend as a replacement for Lotus QuickPlace. It provides additional functionality such as an enhanced user interface, Web logs (blogs), wikis and other collaboration tools for managing projects and creating content. With integrated team work spaces and Web 2.0 capabilities, you can manage team projects and schedules, collaborate, organize discussion threads, and share documents - all from the portal interface, helping increase productivity by sharing and organizing ideas, content, and tasks. Lotus QuickPlace is still included in the download and media packages, until the WebSphere Portal Extend V6.1 release to enable a smooth transition.

Lotus Quickr provides two deployment options: Lotus Quickr services for Lotus Domino and Lotus Quickr services for WebSphere Portal. You may install both deployment options, but only one per entitled processor. Therefore, if you want to install both Lotus Quickr (Domino) and Lotus Quickr (J2EE), you need two WebSphere Portal processors for the entitlement.

The integration of WebSphere Portal with Lotus Quickr requires portlets that are different from Lotus QuickPlace. The Domino Extended Product Portlets (DEPP) for Lotus QuickPlace will not be forward compatible with Lotus Quickr. A new set of portlets is thus available in WebSphere Portal 6.0 (separate download) to display the list of places ("My Places") and feeds from Lotus Quickr ("Feed reader"). Similarly these new portlets are not backward compatible with Lotus QuickPlace.

It is important to note the limitation mentioned in the last paragraph above - the portlets to support Quickr are included in Portal v6.0, but not in the older v5.1 - therefore customers will need to upgrade to Portal v6.0 if they haven't already.  Also, the following licence limitation:

Lotus Quickr provides two deployment options: Lotus Quickr Services for Lotus Domino and Lotus Quickr Services for WebSphere Portal. You are entitled to install one or both of these deployment options, subject to the restrictions within the WebSphere Portal Extend and Lotus Quickr licenses. You may install both deployment options, but only one per entitled processor. Therefore, if you want to install both Lotus Quickr (Domino) and Lotus Quickr (J2EE), you need two WebSphere Portal processors for the entitlement.

I am rather pleased with this news on a personal front a we have customers that are licenced for Portal Extend that have been very keen to deploy Quickr since its release - they can now begin to plan for the install and/or upgrade.