BlueTie Blog

Integrating SaaS Into Legacy Desktop Software

A recent PC World article outlines a research report from Saugatuck Technology that predicts the increasing complexity of integrating Software as a Service offerings into legacy desktop software.

While there are obviously challenges integrating Web-based software with client-server software, this report is short-sighted. There are three main issues:

1. Integrating two client-server software products is already a huge challenge.
The multi-Billion software and services market for integrating legacy apps exists for good reason. 18 month implementations in enterprise software are not uncommon. The challenge of integrating SaaS applications into client-server applications is not going to add complexity to deployments - it is going to drive businesses to adopt SaaS faster. Further, integrating a SaaS application with a good API/SDK (which most have) is easier than integrating two legacy applications that were not designed for a world of open standards and Web Services API's.

2. There is no such thing as "offline applications" anymore.
Today's enterprises all have multiple offices, remote workers, VPNs, and broadband connections. Corporate users demand anywhere, anytime access. Therefore, it is inaccurate to talk about security of offline applications. The Internet is already the conduit for access to corporate applications. The only question is whether the application itself sits behind the firewall, or in the cloud. Companies that specialize in providing SaaS applications, and have dedicated 24x7 security teams are much more likely to have more sophisticated protection than your average mid-market or enterprise firm.

3. The SaaS vendors will make integration a competitive advantage.
The IT staff at each individual corporation will not have to do the heavy lifting. SaaS companies will increasingly realize that by exposing more and more interface options to a company's data and applications, they will increase the appeal of their own applications. SaaS vendors will work together to develop a single integration between platforms (a la Google and Salesforce.com's rumored partnership), enabling thousands of companies to integrate with a single click.

Every major ISV is racing toward a SaaS offering right now. In the process they will blow open what were previously closed-wall platforms. The smartest ones will make integration extremely easy, and build their businesses in the process.

- David Koretz

What Small Businesses Want From Email

Today's small and medium sized business are looking for a high quality, full-featured email suite that meets the needs of their growing business without having to spend a lot of money. How do we know? We asked them.

The combination of cost and feature set is a critical balance for growing companies. They want to "...decrease costs without sacrificing functionality." And they need an "...inexpensive way to get all the functionality that larger businesses rely on for email and collaboration...". They need a way for their staff to work more efficiently together to service a growing base of customers and transactions. They need tools that let them service more customers without hiring more staff.

So as businesses grow, the ability for staff to coordinate work becomes more important. Many "...have grown as a company  and realize [they] need advanced email and collaboration tools." Increased coordination/collaboration can allow for specialization, each person is a specialist at specific functions and thus information can be passed from person to person for action efficiently, or it can be used to 'load balance' the workload by letting multiple people perform the same tasks and thus share the workload. Businesses are looking for email with integrated and shared, calendars, tasks, files and contacts.

This might all seem obvious to some but for many business owners answering the question of how to increase productivity can be complex. And if you're running a very small business, hard to recognize. Communications and coordination amongst staff is just one area of opportunity to do so and may not be so obvious depending on the type of business.

We also heard consistently that a professional appearance is also important to a growing business. Just because it's a small business doesn't mean they want their email screaming it when communicating via email with distributors, vendors or customers. This is why every small business needs an email service that provides domain support. An email service that lets them send and receive email from their own web domain. The number of small business that are still using 'free-mail' consumer email accounts without their own companies domain is still very large. If you own a small business, you can have your own email address domain even if you don't have an extensive web site.  Additionally, if you have your own web site, you can point your email to any good email provider, with the collaboration tools you need to increase productivity,  you don't have to use the email tools provided by your web host - which likely are not specifically designed for businesses.

What do you think small businesses need from their email service? If you're not already using BlueTie what are you using and how's it working for you? If you are already using BlueTie how are you using it to improve productivity at your business?

Work Anywhere

It's that time of year when all the bloggers post their prediction lists on everything from global warming to the latest tech gadget. We think this is going to be the year of Work Anywhere, a trend that gets predicted every year but has not turned into something that affects small businesses as a whole. Until now.

To have a Work Anywhere business you need to be providing some kind of expert services rather than physical services. If you sell things you can also have a Work Anywhere biz. So why do we think this business model will hit its stride in '07?

Here's a few reasons:

• Bandwidth, wi-fi and EVDO. Its getting harder and harder to be somewhere where you can't connect and connect fast. This is critical to the Work Anywhere model.
• SaaS. Software as a Service is what BlueTie does- we provide you with a communication, collaboration and organization suite you can access anywhere from any computer. In the past year I've logged into my BlueTie account in an Internet cafe in Paris, a hotel room in NYC, in a conference in SF, at my friend's camp in the Adirondacks...and, regardless of where I log in or what machine I'm using, there's all my stuff: email, calendar, people, files. I don't need to be in my office or my home office at all. And I can see my co-workers presence online, IM (with BlueTie Pro), email, etc. I might as well be across the hall.
• A big change in understanding how to motivate people. Best Buy's corporate offices now run on a radical new model: no set hours, no schedules, no required attendance. You have your work goals, your deadlines and your resources; you do the work any way that works for you. Productivity is up 30%. This was not a great leap of faith for their upper management. It started as a grassroots effort. Small workgroups heard about the model and surreptitiously started adopting it. By the time execs realized what was going on, the proponents had data and it was impossible to ignore.
• Timeshifting and placeshifting. This is an extension of the previous bullet. If you're a knowledge worker and you have the resources you need, why should you be constrained to work within a nine to five system that evolved from the need to take advantage of daylight? We've got lightbulbs!

Years ago there was a big buzz about 'virtual businesses'. The problem was that the tools to make these businesses work were in their infancy. Now with ubiquitous access, online resources and mobile communication you can run a business from anywhere, on your own terms.

Liberation 2007: Work Anywhere!

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!

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!

Connecting With Customers Globally

We have a customer who does a lot of shipping to the same customer in Southeast Asia. Communications can be a hassle given time differences and the restrictions on attachment size inherent in a lot of email systems (BTW, BlueTie supports up to 25MB attachments).

My recommendation? Give that customer a BlueTie account within your enterprise and use the Shared Files feature to share larger docs. It all happens in our server environment so the distance is minimized (download may be slow based on the distance and bandwidth at both ends but you can share large files- they'll just take a little longer). If you're a BlueTie Pro user you can IM with them instantly to confirm deliveries and shipping dates.

If you don't want an outside vendor or customer to have an account within your enterprise, simply open a BlueTie Free account for them or for your business partners in general- you'll still be able to share files and other BlueTie shared features including calendars and contacts.

Note: BlueTie Pro users can Share file folders with anyone- when you share with someone outside of BlueTie they are sent a URL to access the Folder. Free users can only share within BlueTie.

Automated Scheduling of Meetings

Imagine you're scheduling a meeting that involves a half dozen people, possibly including customers or vendors that are not using BlueTie. Without BlueTie you'd probably email a series of timeslots to your invitees and make several calls to find a mutually available time. With BlueTie this process can be streamlined to the point where it only takes a few clicks to get the same result. This is where Shared Calendars demonstrates the power of our collaboration software.
To use this feature, click your Calendar icon and click the New Event button. A window opens the New Event form. Click the Contacts icon and you'll see all your BlueTie contacts including people outside of your business. Click the names of attendees and they will appear in the attendee list. Name the event, select a time and add any necessary descriptive notes. When you click Save a few interesting things happen. BlueTie checks the calendars of co-workers and tells you if they have a conflict. If they do, you can select another time. Once you've Saved an Event, BlueTie sends a meeting notification to other BlueTie users which they can Accept or Decline. It also sends a similar notification, via email, to non-BlueTie users. They can Accept or Decline by clicking their choice in the email. You can see who has responded by double-clicking on the Event in your Calendar.
When everyone in the meeting is using BlueTie you don't have to keep trying different times until you find one when everyone is available. Simply fill out your Event form and select First Available. The system searches everyone's Calendars and brings back the next time you're all free. If that time isn't good, simply click it again and it goes on to the next timeslot available. You can continue until you find the best time.
The real value of having an integrated application like BlueTie is this kind of functionality. It can literally save hours of time monthly for people with busy schedules. Considering that you can use it for free, that's not a bad deal!

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.

Collaboration Tips

Here's a few quick tips:

BlueTie's Enterprise Contacts list is automatically updated every time you add or remove a user so it serves as an always up-to-date employee directory and phone list.

Assign a user account to help schedule a busy conference room. Share the conference room calendar across your organization and anyone can check availability or book time slots. You can manage vacation calendars the same way.

All businesses have Human Resources documents that must be accessible in current versions to all employees. With Shared Files you can easily manage and provide access to these legally required docs.

What's different about a business application

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.