Share documents and media in libraries

Stay connected to the expertise of the team. Libraries go beyond just storing team and personal content, like cool podcasts, important presentations, and design documents. Libraries build connections to a collective knowledge base built by long hours in the office, lessons learned, projects with complications, and successes you never want to forget. Tap into this community of knowledge and add your own insight.

Explore the capabilities of a library and develop content securely as a team. The cool thing about your library is that all of your information is protected so that you do not need to email yourself "just in case" backup files. Version control protects your information and allows you to look back at your train of thought from the last check in. When you are ready to add content to a document, for example, simply check it out to lock your file and then check your document back into the library when you are done for the day. Another team member can then check out your file to add their insight. Once your document is ready, set up workflows and approval cycles to get the thumbs up on your designs. Assign custom document types to library contents to create custom meta-data, to improve searches in libraries, to create versions of your content upon check in, to enable draft approval options, and to apply custom templates to your content.

Let libraries connect you to your desktop and beyond. Check out documents from a shared library and work with them using the applications on your local computer, such as Microsoft^® Office. After downloading the Lotus Quickr connectors on your computer, you can work in libraries directly on your desktop. Use your Windows Explorer or IBM^® Lotus^® Sametime^® to view libraries to which you have access, work with documents and folders, and contribute content to the server. Share documents with team members using IBM Lotus Notes^® and IBM Lotus Sametime. Automatically replace attachments in e-mails with links to the content in a shared library in IBM Lotus Notes. Remember, you have a choice of where you want to work and how you want to share your work with the team.

Value for your team - Tips for an effective team

There is a time to wiki, a time to use libraries, and a time to use both. All of these places (or components of larger places) help you and a team share and develop information. Design your place to the needs of the project or task you are working on and add components to your places as connections grow. You may start off with a wiki as a development playground but later see that you want a formal document to meet an audit requirement. Places are flexible so go with the flow of innovation.