You may have noticed that we take pains to identify BlueTie as a business application. While it certainly can be used by anyone with a need to organize and communicate, it has several features that are particularly necessary to a business. First, when you open a free or Pro BlueTie account, you're actually opening what we call an Enterprise account. This means you can have multiple users within that account, up to 20 in the case of the free version and unlimited numbers in the Pro (paid) version. You can also manage your users with our Enterprise Manager (EM) utility which is supplied to the person who opens the account.
With EM you have the ability to add/remove users, set global preferences including anti-spam preferences and create divisions. Even a small business will find the Divisions concept useful: you might have a division for Sales, HR, part-timers, etc. You can give EM rights to division managers and limit their access to features. It sounds more complicated than it is- it's very easy to manage your BlueTie account from any online computer, anywhere with EM. It virtually eliminates those calls to your IT company or the resident computer geek.
Another business-friendly feature of BlueTie is domain support. This means that if your company or organization has a web address, i.e.yourcompany.com, then you can have your BlueTie email addresses @ that domain. The New Account Wizard you see when you sign in for the first time shows you how to set this up or you can do it by pointing your MX record (see your domain host for this). No more AOL, gmail or Hotmail addresses in your business.
You can also set up aliases for addresses such as sales@mycompany.com and have any mail sent to that address routed to any of your users.
Last but definitely not least, there is sharing or collaboration. Each BlueTie account includes shared contacts, calendars and files for every user. This is incredibly useful in a business because you can easily schedule meetings across multiple calendars, track vacation time, share contact lists like customers or vendors and share files like contracts, HR and marketing docs. A central admin with access to execs on the road can manage their schedules. And with our Orbitz implementation they'll be able to book travel and automatically put itineraries and details into travelers' calendar. Because we're hosted, all of it can be accessed from any location or computer.
Unlike single user free accounts like gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo mail, BlueTie is a true business application, designed for commercial use by non-technical business people.
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