Collaboration Round-up: Comparing Online Collaboration Offerings The Online World of Collaboration; BlueTie Gerry Blackwell
Mid-size and large enterprises are rushing to adopt collaboration tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint and IBM's Lotus Notes with Quickr — and with good reason. These programs help distributed teams communicate more effectively and manage projects and shared materials, while saving companies travel costs and reducing travel-related productivity losses.
Implementing SharePoint or Notes is probably beyond the abilities and resources of most small businesses, but smaller companies can get many of the same capabilities with easy-to-use, relatively inexpensive hosted or software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
While none of these applications are as comprehensive or well integrated as SharePoint or Notes/Quickr, they do offer a couple of advantages.
Because they're Web-based, people outside the corporate firewall, including employees working at home, suppliers, and customers, can also easily participate, as long as they have an Internet connection.
SaaS offerings are also very inexpensive, and in some cases are even available free of charge.
These three offerings are just a few of the many. In fact, Internet-based collaboration solutions are fast becoming a glut on the market, especially conferencing services. Recent new entrants include Yuuguu, a virtually free Skype-inspired teleconference service, HearMe, an inexpensive IP-based video conferencing and screen-sharing solution from AVM Software Inc. and SightSpeed, another video conferencing service.
And then there are tools organized around wiki — collaborative knowledge base production — and/or blogging capabilities, products such as Basecamp from 37signals LLC, Clearspace from Jive Software, Confluence from Atlassian and TeamPage from Traction Software.
"The market is messy," notes consultant Kathleen Reidy, a senior analyst with The 451 Group. "It's hard for companies to figure out which is the right technology for what they're trying to do."
The three products we look at, BlueTie, CentralDesktop and GoToMeeting, all have different feature sets, although BlueTie and CentralDesktop do overlap.
BlueTie offers e-mail and collaboration capabilities designed as a low-cost alternative to Microsoft Exchange. (Click for larger image).
» BlueTie
BlueTie, launched in 1999, was one of the first hosted e-mail and collaboration services — the company says the very first. It was designed for small businesses as a low-cost alternative to Microsoft's server-based Exchange e-mail and personal information management product.
BlueTie says it has 230,000 small business customers today and manages over four million e-mail boxes.
It's an e-mail solution first and foremost, like Exchange, but also includes instant messaging (IM) capabilities. And it lets users manage contacts, calendars, and task lists online as well.
All data, including e-mail, is stored on BlueTie's secure servers so you can access it from any Internet-connected computer and some handhelds by keying in your user name and password.
BlueTie also offers some integration with Microsoft Office Outlook, including automatic synchronization between Outlook and BlueTie databases using BlueTie's DirectConnect application. So it's also possible to store BlueTie data locally.
Small companies can centrally manage calendars for a number of employees. A contact center agent or receptionist with proper authorization could book appointments for multiple field sales people, for example, and the meetings would appear automatically in the individual's calendar view.
They can also centrally manage contact lists and maintain a Web-accessible store of shared documents and other files.
