About Lotus Quickr

We saw TeamRoom, QuickPlace... and now Quickr. IBM claims that it's "the fastest way to share everyday content across connected teams". Some useful links:

Quickr information

• Product homepage @ IBM on Domino
• The Quickr Blog by Stuart McIntyre, on PHP
• The Connections Blog on PHP
• LotusRockStar by Rob Novak, on BlogSphere
• Blog on Lotus Quickr by Satwik Seshasai, on Quickr.nsf

Under the hood

After inspection with FireBug, I saw a lot of inline JavaScript, Dojo, Scriptaculous and even references to the Haiku JavaScript engine that powers iNotes. Apart from the source code being an absolute mess, I was quite shocked to see the doctype: HTML 4. With all that JavaScript, was it really necessary to stick with the old HTML 4?

Some tests

I tested some basic functions of Quickr by creating a place, adding a document, a wiki... I used the Quickr on Domino that is available on Lotus Greenhouse (login required). I was shocked by the amount of errors I got. Just some of them:

• I tried to change my language from Dutch to English. It didn't work: Quickr decided suddenly that the spaces in my user name are unacceptable.
• The greenhouse Quickr runs on https://, but a lot of external links are still http://. This causes a warning every time a page is loaded in Internet Explorer.
• When you hit the refresh button to reload a normal page, in many cases it still has to POST things instead of just 'GET'ting the page. This leads to yet another warning.
• The content of a document I created with Greek text did not load in FireFox.
• The wiki I created with Internet Explorer did not show as a tab after reloading my place in FireFox.
• The amount of JavaScript errors on each page ranges from 2 to 10. I only counted the errors, not the vast amount of warnings FireBug gave me. I got the impression that the JavaScript was never properly debugged, at least not with FireBug.

After a while, I gave up. When I started this blog, it was my intention never to pick on a product. For Quickr, I have to make an exception. The idea behind it is great, but what IBM delivered does not meet my idea of a quality product. I'm afraid to say that I will never become a fan of Quickr.

Quickr, but not quick

I recorded load times for each page ranging from 5 seconds for a simple page refresh to more than 20 seconds for the creation of a place. "The fastest way to share everyday content across connected teams". Quickr: please scrap 'fastest' and consider a name change.