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We're using Bloomfire to act as our intranet solution; we've used other solutions -- some
open-source software to fill our intranet needs. It didn't really work out -- search
wasn't there, the collaboration aspect wasn't there -- it worked for what we needed at the
time.
Bloomfire definitely gives us one solution to collaborate with all of our employees because
we have employees from the west to the east coast and share all of our content.
I have a background as a SharePoint admin engineer -- it takes an engineer's dedication
to get it running correctly. SharePoint was one that we looked at -- wasn't really excited
about it - so I kind of went to SharePoint hosting so that I could find a company that
would do all of it for me. There's too much there -- it adds pieces that you'd want but
it doesn't really give you a cohesive solution -- at least in my opinion.
I really wanted something that looked new - that gave that image of a fresh look and
new technology and an out-of-the-box way of doing something. When I was looking for vendors,
Bloomfire came up and actually I think the tagline was "A new way to do the intranet"
or "Your new solution for the intranet." I clicked on it and looked at a demo and it
was exactly what I was looking for. It definitely had that fresh look - the user interface was
awesome -- it had a question and answer engine that was great.
Here at Mason-McDuffie we run what we call a "Scenario Desk" -- lots of questions, lots
of answers -- so that was perfect for that. It allowed our employees to be engaged with
each other, which was definitely lacking with our other intranet.
The biggest part of Bloomfire that I liked was the search -- searching for the tags,
and the title -- going into the documents themselves -- what we wanted to do was create
a real simple way for our employees to find content instead of clicking here, looking
for a folder here, looking at a bunch of columns of data to find wherever it was nested in
- whatever hierarchy there was - giving our employees a simple search box to find stuff
was great. I think email has grown into something that's used mostly as an IM tool right now.
I'm trying to cut that down.
With Bloomfire, they can just go to our portal and look up the information and get it. They
don't have to send John an email and then get it to Suzi and then Suzi gets it back
to John and then Bob has something and then there's all these different emails and someone's
not on the chain. The productivity to take 1-2 minutes to go to a Bloomfire and find
the content, find the answer, ask a question as opposed to 15 minutes of emails and maybe
not even have the question answered after that. Productivity I think is up there pretty
high.