One of the common patterns seen in customer environments today is the need for an integrated solution. It is important that solutions like Lotus Quickr be able to easily integrate content into other environments which have already be deployed.

Out of the box, Lotus Quickr provides several types of integration. This includes both the deployment architectures mentioned earlier. Some of those other integration areas which are covered later in Chapter 12, Integrating IBM Lotus Quickr with other IBM Products, are around the Lotus Connections, Lotus Sametime, and Enterprise Content Management products.

Lotus Connections is a social networking product that provides a very rich set of capabilities, which enterprise customers are looking for today in the social space. Examples of these services include employee profile and contact information, communities, wikis, blogs, social activities, social bookmarks, discussion forums, and file sharing. In the Lotus Connections product, these bundled services built on a WebSphere Application Server stack, are designed for small, medium, and large customers alike.

The integration story with Lotus Quickr is primarily around the following two areas:

The activity integration is available out of the box with some simple configuration changes. The community integration is handled by installing of a piece of plugin code on the Lotus Connections server.

After the community integration is enabled a navigational link is available between both Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections. This allows end users to easily navigate quickly between the two.