BlueHouse and Prolifiq

IBM's Bluehouse is in part positioned as a means for companies to connect with customers, this partnership would appear to make it easy for companies to organize material that they commonly use for customer interaction and support. Previously.

" ... Prolifiq Software, the expert at distributing content from within social networks to outside audiences, today announced a partnership agreement with IBM to integrate Prolifiq 1:1 communication for the sales channel application into the “Bluehouse” set of collaboration services. “Bluehouse,” the new social network for business, combined with Prolifiq will provide network members with immediate access to the content they need and quickly share it with customers, partners and prospects ... "

BlueHouse Examined

After a little trouble getting let into the IBM Bluehouse collaborative networking capability I attended a conference call with other beta explorers. About 60 people attended, it appeared they were mostly IBMers. I was impressed overall. They led us through the process of using Bluehouse for extended meetings and sharing documents and screens. Well thought-out with capabilities of other web based project management systems, but not too many to make it confusing. That is important, since many users will have only casual interaction.

IBM has made it fairly easy to invite external people to meetings, a key capability. Explicitly cloud oriented. There were a number of glitches found by folks, to be expected for a Beta. Will continue to attend these meetings as I explore. I was able to pick up the basics in an hour or so. This will not be free forever, IBM plans to charge a monthly fee after beta.

IBM Bluehouse

Last year we closely examined some of IBM's social technology work, they link it to their large workforce very successfully.

They have released a beta that includes many of the tools useful for working together in teams, including " ... a social network, a document sharing tool which includes tagging for quick access, a task management solution, a forms wizard, a charting tool and a chat application ... ". And most fundamentally, screen sharing. This is still under their Lotus URL, but does not require Lotus Notes.

I have done some examining of information sharing capabilities for remote meetings, and most are either too expensive or problematic. I also like their notion of an 'extended meeting'. They have several short videos that explain this. Free cloud signup here, still exploring.

Update: For any of you intending to explore this, I discovered later that this is not a completely free and open beta. You can sign up, but later found the signup is an application and by some unclear criteria you will be accepted or not. Still trying to get access to do an evaluation.

Update2: Now up and running on the Beta. If anyone out there would like to co-evaluate this (it is a collaboration venue) let me know. I will publish my findings in the upcoming weeks.