Collaboration Round-up: Comparing Online Collaboration Offerings BlueTie Continued and CentralDesktop Gerry Blackwell
The BlueTie browser interface somewhat resembles Outlook. A button bar across the top shows links for launching the principal functions — daily summary, e-mail, contacts, calendar, tasks, etc.. The main work area, as in Outlook, displays whichever function you choose.
Along the left side are two smaller panels. One displays contacts — filtered if desired so that only personal, enterprise, or shared contacts are shown, or only contacts currently online in BlueTie.
The other panel shows icon links for creating new e-mails, events, contacts, and tasks. Clicking one launches a pop-up window with a fillable form. To book a meeting with members of your team or company, for example, you click New Event, type in a title, click Contacts to display the contacts list in the New Event dialog and click on names to invite to the meeting.
Then you can select a date using pop-up calendars, or click First Available, which analyzes the participants' calendars and automatically books the meeting into the first time slot in which all are available.
BlueTie has begun to integrate additional online services from partners, including Web-based fax, e-mail marketing, and travel booking through Orbitz. The integration with Orbitz is quite elegant.
You can choose departure point and destination and see flight options automatically overlaid on your BlueTie calendar, for example. And BlueTie recognizes e-mailed Orbitz e-tickets, automatically extracts the itinerary information, and inserts it in your calendar.
The free version of BlueTie provides 5GB of online storage and support for as many as 20 people. The Pro version costs $5 per person per month and adds advanced features, including IM, Outlook integration, and live technical support.
» CentralDesktop
CentralDesktop, launched in 2005, was also designed primarily for small businesses, as a lower-cost, hosted alternative to Microsoft Office SharePoint.
CentralDesktop's workspace home page gives you a snapshot of your upcoming tasks and recent activities. (Click for larger image).
The company says it has over 100,000 registered customers, but many only use the limited free version. About 1,500 companies pay for and use CentralDesktop regularly, most of them firms with between five and 100 employees.
Whereas BlueTie is built around e-mail, CentralDesktop is mostly about project management.
Companies can set up dedicated "workspaces" for each project and invite members — from inside or outside the company — to participate. Each member is assigned appropriate permissions, allowing them to read only, edit, add and/or delete items or have full administrative control.
Within each workspace, managers can set milestones or project goals and group tasks under them, along with dates for completion. They can then, with a few mouse clicks, assign milestones and tasks to members.
Members assigned a task receive e-mail notification, the due date automatically appears in their personal CentralDesktop calendar, and later they receive e-mails reminding them about tasks that are due soon or overdue.
Tasks and milestones appear in the main calendar for the workspace as well and in lists and reports, color coded to show priority and status.
CentralDesktop also gives work teams a rich set of tools for managing project-related documents, including version control and tracking functions, plus the capability to set up online discussions.
Members and managers can upload files of any type to the CentralDesktop server and capture Web pages and include them in the project document base as well. The built-in full-text search function indexes all popular file formats, including Microsoft Office and PDF.
Only one person at a time can "check out" a document to read or edit it. This helps avoid version conflicts. The main page for a document or Web page shows its revision history — who revised it and when — and all the comments that have been made about it, by whom, when, and about which revision.
CentralDesktop will even automatically send out e-mail notification to team members when a document is revised or commented on. Recipients can reply by e-mail and their comments will automatically be added to the CentralDesktop database.
Members and project managers can set up discussion forums, which are tracked much the way documents are. They can also set up Web conferences — complete with screen sharing.
To make it easier to set up impromptu conferences, CentralDesktop detects online presence of team members using popular instant messaging services, including MSN and Skype.
CentralDesktop pricing is more complex than BlueTie's. The free version provides 25 MB of storage and two workspaces for up to five members.
Paid workspace plans range from $25 a month for 250 MB, three workspaces and 10 members to $249 a month for 10 GB of storage, 100 active and unlimited archived workspaces and unlimited members.
Web conferencing is priced separately — the service is provided by a partner. Plans range from $35 to $175 a month.
