BlueHouse Jam Session

Yesterday we attended the Bluehouse Jam Session only to discover that it was actually targetted at early adopters of Bluehouse, ie a couple of SMB's & a few IBM partners, and not at all the strategic & visionary type session we had expected. It was therefore not the most relevant session for us and we ended up leaving after about an hour but a couple of points were raised which I thought were interesting insights into BlueHouse. Keeping in mind that Bluehouse is presented as being the Next Big Thing in Collaboration SaaS,

1. Email is not integrated in Bluehouse! Whaaat? will Will say :) According to IBM, BlueHouse is their brave attempt at liberating companies from chronic overdependence on email (sounds familiar?), hence the lack of our favourite tool in Bluehouse. My personal feeling is our users are too used to email for us to offer them this kind of revolution, & not evolution, forgive the pun :D

2. Bluehouse was initially targetted at SMB's but given the demand IBM is now presenting the offering to large businesses as well. On the other hand, SMB's are already experiencing issues around identity management & user access & provisioning which while perhaps workable in SMB's where the number of users is smaller, would be unacceptable for us. More on this once I've found out more about what IBM thinks the challenges are going to be once they go big business on the BlueHouse front and how they are planning to deal with them.

On the other hand, BlueHouse like all the other products we have seen so far are totally slick as far as the UI goes. Absolutely wicked :)

And now I'm running late for dinner so I'd better go! To be continued ...