Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Bluehouse model avoids Facebook foulups

IBM Bluehouse offers social networking tools including web conferencing, instant messaging, document sharing, directory and profiles, all delivered via the web. That sounds a lot like Facebook... so why should you pay for something you can get for free?

Reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story about how one of the Big Four Banks in Australia encouraged its corporate sales teams to become involved in Facebook to facilitate their interaction at work. The sales team was enthusiastic adopters of this new technology and this year-long team building exercise culminated in the annual sales awards followed by the inevitable discussions on their Facebook Forums. Unfortunately for the Bank, four of the top five sales performers were immediately offered (and subsequently accepted) jobs with the Bank's competitors who had been devotedly monitoring the Sales Team's Facebooks throughout the year.

Ouch!

That issue won't be a problem for the Bluehouse model which provides security controls to limit casual browsing by The Great Unwashed. You can get more information about Blushouse here

BTW: Did you know that BlueHouse runs on Foundations? There had to be a reason I was talking about it.

Foundations = IBM's Linux-based Operating system
Foundations: Start = Lotus Domino server running on Foundations
BlueHouse = IBM's social networking tool running on Foundations
.

4 comments:

IdoNotes said...

You are saying that Bluehouse is a social networking tool? I disagree there and call it a collaboration tool, but far from social networking

Graham Dodge said...

I'm not too fussed at the marketing descriptions. I called Bluehouse 'social networking' because I was drawing an analogy with Facebook and my point is that Bluehouse is a better fit for business than Facebook.

Anonymous said...

Foundations is an extention to the Bluehouse cloud computing model. It doesn't run on Foundations. :)

Graham Dodge said...

OK... I don't mind being wrong... but are you telling me I can't trust 'Network World'?

"Based on Lotus Foundations, Bluehouse is designed to help small- and midsized businesses collaborate securely beyond their organizational boundaries. File storing and sharing, Web meetings and IM are among the Bluehouse tools."