BlueTie AJAX email, calendar, collaborator

Filed under: Business, Internet, Security, Utilities, News, E-mail, Office, Productivity, Web services, Freeware, Social Software

BlueTie AJAX email, calendar, collaborator

by Ryan Carter Nov 4th 2006

I don't know how you feel about blue collar, but if you want, need, or simply must have yet another email account, BlueTie is one to check out. BlueTie however, really is much more than just an email account. Not only is it free email with 5GB of storage per user (yes, more than Google so far), but provides unified calendar and other collaborative tools including shared file storage, an "enterprise" user manager, tasks, and a frighteningly Outlook-like calendar. Many features of BlueTie remind me of Outlook's meeting requests, contacts, calendar, and other features in fact. The free account limits you to 20 users, but who's counting? Small business owners and groups will love this app. It is AJAX based and looks good enough that I am considering putting my business on it entirely, since most of the app can be shared with all your people, contacts, calendar, and file storage. Did I mention that you can use your own domain with BlueTie, as well as the fact that it has Virus and Spam protection built in? Oh yeah, it has that too.

[Via TechCrunch]

An empty but very functional contacts view

The BlueTie calendar, empty too, but still very useful.

Tags: 5GB, app, calendar, collaboration, contacts, email, entertprise, file storage, FileStorage, online, small business, SmallBusiness, unified, web

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Deano said 10:32PM on 11-04-2006

Looks interesting but I have a few problems with this;

I swear by Gmail and Google Calendar
I use a free Basecamp account for collaboration and tracking work
I like Foldershare for sharing files (encrypted and stays on MY computers).

I guess that's the problem with integrated solutions like this - some bits you will like and others won't work so well.

And the other thing is that Blue Tie are only accepting sign-ups within the U.S so I can't try it anyway.

David Koretz said 1:30PM on 11-05-2006

Thanks for the great review! We have been working really hard to further improve the app, and have a ton of wild new features coming out in the next few months. It should get really interesting!

Deano, re: international, we just opened it up worldwide in response to the feedback we got, so try it out!

David Koretz
President & CEO
BlueTie

Nr17 said 3:21PM on 11-05-2006

Yes - nice but U.S. only and therefore useless for the rest of us. I tried so very often to subscribe but only get an errorcode 1036.

So - sorry Bluetie, but I think that boundaries are not relevant anymore in the cyberworld.

CharlesJR said 3:30PM on 11-05-2006

Seems nice.

Just played around with the free version for about an hour.

I'm kind of addicted to Backpack for corroboration and TRUMBA for calendering. We've been with them for long enough that our pricing is much lower than they currently charge new users. Our company uses TRUMBA regularly.

Off the top of my head, the biggest challenge I see with this product is that it is not very simple to share a calender event with multiple people. You have to create the event, and invite people to it before it shows on their personal calender.

The other thing that strikes me as odd is that when someone does accept the invitation and the event shows on their calender, if you have all your employees shared (so you can see their schedules) then the event will show up multiple times on one calender. So if you have ten people you've scheduled the event on, it will show up TEN TIMES on the shared space.

THAT is very weird and confusing.

Though I will spend some more time with this because I really do WANT to like this. It seems like a perfect fit for 99% of what we do.

CharlesJR

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