BlueTie Blog

Happy Birthday Featuretisements!

Featuretisements celebrated its first birthday on Tuesday, October 23rd!

What a first year it's been, too.

Last year, we launched Featuretisements as an innovative way to monetize applications. We knew it was something that would shake up the industry... but we didn't expect the tremendous response we received.

To date, we have implemented four Featuretisement partners including Orbitz and Constant Contact. What's even more impressive though is the number of partners that have signed contract to become Featuretisement partners. Currently the number of partners stands at 23! And that's just signed partners. The phones are continuously ringing with other providers who are interested in signing on as well.

Let's not forget that Featuretisements also took first place at the ad Tech awards this April for best business to business transaction Web site!

What does it all mean? It means that year two should be even more interesting! Stay tuned for what comes next...   

It's all about change for the better

We've seen a lot of positive progress at BlueTie in the past few months. From the launch of our first integrated features in partnership with leading Web service providers such as Orbitz, Constant Contact, eFax and Business.com, to signing distribution agreements with some of the biggest names in the Internet Service Provider industry, to being one of the fastest-growing small and medium-sized business service providers. It's been a great year.

And now there's something else to be excited about.

We've just launched a brand new look and feel for our Web site. It's a clean, new look that makes it much easier for you to find what you're looking for, and highlights all that we bring to our various customers and partners. Check it out for yourself.

In touring the updated site, you'll see one more thing that's new... it's our promise to you.

Some may call it a tagline, but it's really so much more than that. It reflects who we are, what we deliver to our customers and where we are going as a company. It encapsulates the identity, passion, values and vision of our company into a quick, concise phrase. It's a short sentence that acts as an invitation, a call-to-action, a rallying cry and a commitment.

It's a commitment to continuously deliver new technologies via SaaS, creating a competitive advantage for you and your company.

For BlueTie, that is "Inbox Innovation"

BlueTie Launches a New Way to Book Travel

Today we, in partnership with Orbitz, launched it's new travel planning feature. With it, you can do flight searches and overlay flights right on top of your personal calendar. You can see if a flight will get you there in time for a meeting or see if there is a sufficient gap for you to leave the meeting and get to the airport before a flight. No more tabbing between your email and the Orbitz site to figure out what flight times will work, it can all be done on one screen in BlueTie. And the ability to just type it in, "Flights from ROC to SFO" for example, is just plain cool.

Another great thing about the travel planning is the way you can sort the hotel results. All the hotels come back in a list, one per line. You can double click on any hotel to get the details; photos, does it have a gym, pool, etc. But what I love about the one per line listing is how easily I can sort and compare prices and stars now. There just isn't a faster or easier way to compare these items that I have seen anywhere else.

There is, of course, an official press release, but if you really want to see how cool it is, just go view the demo via travel.bluetie.com.

Let us know what you think of the new travel planning feature.

Free Information From BlueTie

We've heard from many of our customers that they selected BlueTie because their small business is growing and they need email, calendaring, contact and files tools that can grow with them. Traditionally, small and mid-sized businesses have had little choice when considering advanced messaging systems. Microsoft Exchange was the only option for businesses seeking collaboration tools like shared calendars and contacts combined with true business class email, despite the complexity and high cost of implementing and maintaining Exchange. BlueTie changes this model by offering 'better than Exchange' functionality at a fraction of the cost.

Today BlueTie launched two new ways for finding out more about BlueTie and how it can help your growing business. The first is a Free Custom Evaluation. Simply complete a short online form and a BlueTie representative will call you to understand your business needs and interests in BlueTie. Following your conversation, a custom assessment of how BlueTie can help your growing business will be sent to you via email.

The second is a Free Webinar on Wednesdays at 11am or 2pm (ET). Once you sign up for a free Webinar an email with a link to the Webinar and information for the audio portion of the Webinar will be sent to you. Simply join the Webinar at your chosen time, 11am or 2pm ET and see how BlueTie can help your growing business.

We hope that you will take advantage of these new ways to find out more about BlueTie.

I'll 'see' you at the the Webinar on Wednesday!

Creating Links in Email: Don't load your email messages up with attachments and images

When you use email to send a customer newsletter, follow-up after a sales call or respond to a request for information, it's important to be considerate of the recipient when composing the message. I frequently receive emails with multiple attachments and I seldom open them. Although BlueTie supports an industry leading attachment size of 25MB, many recipient's email systems can't handle really big attachments. Also, opening an attachment adds another step to the process a customer or prospect has to go through to get your message, decreasing the likelihood they will actually see it.

Fortunately there's a simple fix. Put your messages on your web site as web pages or PDF documents and link to them in your email. This keeps the email simple and gives your recipients a one click way to access the info. There are two ways you can embed web links into your email:

• Simply copy and paste the URL from the target page into the email
• Even better (and more professional), use our Link tool. Choose the word or phrase in your email message that you want to link to the web page, highlight it and click the Link tool- it looks like a little chain. Paste the web page URL into the dialog box that appears. You can also add a Tooltip. This is a description of the link that appears when the user mouses over the link. So you might link to a sales doc and your tooltip might say: AntiSpam Information. Click OK in the dialog box and you're done.

Anyone who has received an email with tons of pictures and attachments will really appreciate this approach. Instead of loading the email itself with large images and attachments, link to them on the web. You'll save your customers time, your message is less likely to get blocked as spam (multiple attachments are a red flag) and you'll drive traffic to your web site.

CRN Review: BlueTie Takes On Exchange

Today we received a very favorable review in CRN that focuses on the fact that, unlike many of our competitors, we are a business application, designed to be straightforward to use, easily managed and reliable. One of the great aspects of the review, from our POV, is the positioning of BlueTie as an alternative to Microsoft Exhange, the costly middle market messaging solution from the 10,000 lb gorilla. We set out eight years ago to provide small and medium size businesses with a real alternative to paying for racks of servers, licenses and ongoing service fees to keep those overly complex systems running. Reviews like this validate our vision!

Looking Ahead: 2007

2006 has been a big year for BlueTie with many product upgrades, rapid growth and the introduction of our BlueTie Free product. 2007 promises to be an even faster-paced year here. Some of the things you'll be seeing in the weeks and months ahead include:

• Major upgrade to our Contacts application (much more detail coming soon)
• Changes to our user interface to enable easy customization of how your BlueTie account looks and functions
• Multiple integration of new business services including the ability to initiate and manage email campaigns with Constant Contact, fax receiving and sending within BlueTie via eFax, the ability to book travel within your calendar via Orbitz and a lot more. Watch for announcements as these and many more business services become available within your BlueTie environment
• Enhanced Outlook integration in BlueTie Pro

As usual, all upgrades to existing products are free to all affected BlueTie users. To put this in perspective, the expected per user cost of upgrading from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 is between $150-250 depending on system configuration!

Here at BlueTie we're excited about the year ahead and a lot of even cooler stuff we can't talk about just yet...

The Small Business Computing 2007 Excellence in Technology Awards: We'd appreciate your vote!

Are you a happy BlueTie business user? We hope so because we know we offer the best collaboration solution on the market for small and mid-sized businesses. The most storage space, best anti-spam, widest feature set and it's a crazy good deal- after all who can beat Free with no ads? Not to mention that BlueTie Pro is a great product at $4.99 per user per month.

So, enough pitching. The voting for the Small Business Computing's 2007 Excellence in Technology Awards is open to business owners like you and we'd appreciate your support. You can vote here (you'll find BlueTie listed under Collaboration). It's easy, requires no personal info and only takes a minute.

Voting is open until January 7, 2007, so vote early and vote often (;-)...and a big thanks in advance!

4 Star Review by PCMag for BlueTie Free

This morning, PC Mag, in a review titled BlueTie Free, gave our free application a four star rating. We're very proud to receive this accolade as it reinforces that our free business email, calendar and collaboration application is the best available. Thanks, PC Mag!

Invite Your Friends and Colleagues to Open Free BlueTie Accounts

If you've opened a free BlueTie account you may have noticed that you have a number of Invitations available to you on the My Day page (the first page that opens after logging in). They're in the right hand column below the Universal Inbox. These are provided as an easy way to invite other business owners and anyone else who you think would like to check out BlueTie. They're very easy to use: just click on the Invitation, click a recipient from your Contacts to send it to and you're done. You can use our text or add your own. Your invitee can accept or decline the invitation as they choose. If they choose not to try BlueTie, they will not receive further contact from us as a result of your invite- we respect your privacy.

Help us spread the word about BlueTie Free- we think it's a great solution for any small business.