Yesterday I wrote a bit about the early days of Lotus Quickplace and provided how it is positioned now. As I said then I was a big fan of Quickplace in 2000 and implemented it with several clients including Ryder. Here are some success stories that I received from Liz McKay Beckhardt. Lotus Product Manager from 1997 to 2001.
1. Major Automotive Manufacturer
QuickPlace was deployed to over 20,000 internal users, and a QuickPlace extranet was available for collaboration with another 15-20,000 partners, suppliers and customers. In addition to this fairly typical use, the CEO and executive team have their own QuickPlace server with a highly customized QuickPlace application that leverages Ajax, JavaScript, Java, and various other technologies. In this company, there is a monthly strategy meeting of the top 40 executives -- somewhere in the world. At these meetings, executives evaluate proposals for major changes and initiatives -- for instance, opening new plants, entering new markets, or making workforce changes. Each executive, from the CEO to division presidents to executive vice presidents, is responsible for evaluating each proposal every month in the days before the meeting, making comments, and casting their "vote" - indicating that the proposal is okay as is, needs clarification, or that they see problems.
QuickPlace’s integration with Microsoft Office was for years a perfect way to share these proposals. With some customization, however, became even better. Executives could launch presentations and comment on each slide individually before voting. At the end of the voting period, the CEO had a single page to review with comments on each proposal, pointing him specifically to the page of the proposal where the questions or comments apply. This change, enabled by QuickPlace and some innovative development, made the strategy meetings more productive. The application enhanced security for HR issues, and a dynamic agenda builder for the actual meeting planning.
2. Major US-Based Insurance Company
QuickPlace was used for a specific purpose at this company - collaborative training. Launched in 2000, the QuickPlace service was (and still is) deeply integrated with IBM Lotus Sametime. There are three major integration points between the product - awareness, a chat facility, and Sametime meeting scheduling. In addition to this, the company commissioned customization to show place-specific awareness directly on every page. This way, users know who is "with them" working in the place at the time they are. This feature has been extremely helpful for the internal training efforts of the company. On the extranet, QuickPlace and Sametime were used for training agents in the use of the company's claims software - QuickPlace for reference materials and Sametime for screen-sharing meetings.
3. International Finance and Insurance Company
QuickPlace was deployed to 20,000 users inside and outside this company - again a typical deployment, but this time with a twist. For the extranet, QuickPlace was surfaced via WebSphere Portal to the company's top 1,000 customers - each of them major companies themselves. It was absolutely critical that the place conform to the company's UI standards, so deep UI customization was accomplished to make the experience completely seamless. In addition, the company has added four new "standard" forms to QuickPlace, and integrated them so they appear to be part of the core product. The new forms add even more productivity to the deployment - users can import Acrobat PDFs or Flash presentations, create pages of content that "remind their owners" when they need review, and can assign tasks to multiple individuals, with each assignee given the ability to indicate when "their part is done". The application was so successful that the company converted hundreds of their clients from a 90s-era Microsoft SQL Server / ASP extranet application to the global QuickPlace application. In this case, thinking “out of the box” led the development team to build some components of the QuickPlace applications as separate databases, creating a new set of best practices for large deployments.
All these cases demonstrate the power of collaboration and the promise of web based tools to enable this collaboration. These success stories are representative of key projects undertaken by SNAPPS, an IBM Business Partner and the official IBM Design Partner for QuickPlace. SNAPPS focuses on making its global customers more profitable and productive with advanced collaboration tools from IBM. The SNAPPS team has been speaking on QuickPlace for six years at IBM and Lotus conferences, co-wrote the certification exam for QuickPlace and both IBM Redbooks on the product. Rob Novak, the president of SNAPPS maintains a blog, Lotus Rock Star, that covers mcuh on this topic.
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