Yours, Mine, and Ours (a.k.a. Project Fonda)
When you start looking at QuickPlace as more than just a tool to create instant team rooms, you'll start seeing a myriad of different applications for it. I've started thinking about it is as an extension of my company's Domino environment that can help us rapidly deploy extensions of our corporate Web site, expand our corporate intranet, and build extranets that can take data from Domino and present it to our customers securely (more on this in a future article).

There are three main areas where we have identified that we can use the technology QuickPlace provides in order to create valuable services for our customers. We like to call these three areas, "Yours, Mine, and Ours" (like the Henry Fonda/Lucille Ball movie of the same name). Here's an explanation of each:

Yours
The "Yours" is creating QuickPlaces based on the design of our corporate Web site, which can be maintained by members of different departments using tools they're already familiar with, like Microsoft Word. This enables you to rapidly create an extension of our corporate site by empowering the content providers to create pages that match the look-and-feel of our corporate site perfectly. In fact, I sometimes enjoy playing the, "Is it Domino or is it QuickPlace?" game with people, as shown in Figure A. Only the URL gives me away.

FIGURE A


I was able to use QuickPlace to create a page that matches the look-and-feel of our corporate Web site. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Mine
The "Mine" is creating customized extranets for our customers. We had originally planned to deploy this as a Domino application, but as we started playing with QuickPlace, we realized that it would be an ideal system to use to deliver information to our customers. Not only does it allow for account managers to post their own content, but it also enables us to use PlaceBots (QuickPlace's equivalent to the Domino agent) to extract data out of Domino databases and recreate it within a QuickPlace. This way, our customers get the content they need without us having to give them access to our main corporate intranet. And the people who best know who should have access, such as account managers, can immediately change the access list without assistance from us.

Ours
The "Ours," for us, includes not only the ability to create instant team rooms (which is what QuickPlace is most often promoted for) but also the ability to create and manage our own internal intranet. We've long wanted to create our own intranet, but we didn't have the time to develop it the way we wanted it to look and function using Domino. By using QuickPlace, we're able to instantly post useful information and are also able to easily tweak the design of the entire QuickPlace (or totally replace it with a new theme/style sheet). Now we can focus on making the content compelling.

Tips on customizing QuickPlace
Ever since we've started looking at QuickPlace in this broader context, it's become a key part of some of our most important projects. We've expected a lot from QuickPlace, and so far we haven't been disappointed. Below I'm going to share with you some of the basic techniques that I use to create a custom theme for a QuickPlace and to tweak it to look exactly like I want.