19 months on – IBM upgrades to Quickr

Lotus Quickr 8.0 shipped on 27th June 2007.

On Monday (26th January 2009) Chris Pepin posted the following:

Quickr Upgrade

For the past five years, IBM has provided an extranet Quickplace service to allow external customers and partners to collaborate with IBM employees on various projects   Quickr has replaced Quickplace and offers a host of advanced features and capabilities to improve collaboration.   In the coming weeks, IBM will be upgrading its service to Quickr.  Stay tuned!

I’m saying no more…

Competition for Quickr?

In searching for some info on Lotus Quickr this morning, I came across this sponsored ad:

A couple of things sprang to mind:
1) I haven’t come across many Google Adwords ads that are so directly for a competitive product.  It’s an interesting strategy, that I am sure produces variable results.  Perhaps getting Lotus Notes/Quickr/Connections into the search results for Microsoft Exchange/Sharepoint etc. might bear fruit?
2) ThoughtFarmer is new to me – it looks an good solution from the marketing materials (what doesn’t), but is one I haven’t heard mentioned by customers or analysts in the past.  This is how it is described:

ThoughtFarmer is a knowledge sharing solution for the new enterprise. It’s used as:

    * a standalone intranet or extranet
    * a collaboration hub
    * the knowledge-sharing component of an existing intranet

ThoughtFarmer embraces the good things wikis have brought us: an open, easy, democratic authoring environment with no barriers to content creation. ThoughtFarmer then adds structure and social networking to that wiki core.

So, the question… Have you come across ThoughtFarmer in your organisation or any that you deal with?  If so, can you share your experience?