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BlueTie: Page 3 of 4

The e-mail feature will look familiar to anyone who's used Outlook or Lotus Notes, with its three-pane screen design containing folders, folder view, message preview. It's very good Web-based e-mail. Like those applications, it's folder-oriented, so you create your own organization by creating folders, and dragging and dropping messages into them. It also has some nice search functionality. In fact, BlueTie is so much like a desktop application that you start looking for some features that it doesn't provide, like the ability to reset the read/unread status.

The calendaring application has the same types of strengths and limitations. You can share calendars with other BlueTie users and control which calendars you choose to display together. You can even choose how you share your calendar: just show "free" and "busy," give read-only access to all the details, or delegate complete read-write control. But on the other hand, there are limitations. For example, you can see other people's calendars, and when you add people to a meeting they get a notification and can accept or reject the invitation -- but there's no free-time lookup capability to help you find the most likely time for the meeting, and if you send an invitation and then cancel the meeting, the invitation lingers on to become a confusing historical footnote.

The document-sharing functionality provides considerable storage space; uploading is very easy and sharing very flexible. Selecting files, which can be a pain in some Web-based applications, is easy in BlueTie's interface: You just select files using your Shift and Ctrl keys. (But only files; you can't transfer entire folders.) As with calendars, you can choose whom you will share your documents with on a folder-by-folder basis (but not file-by-by file) and whether they'll have read-write or read-only access. There's a check-out/check-in function to keep multiple editors from overwriting one another's changes.

You're The Boss Of BlueTie

Everything about BlueTie user accounts is under the direct control of the owner/administrator. You can create and delete user accounts at will, and set the applications they can use and level of control they have. You can build a company directory, then add divisions within the directory and delegate as much or as little of your control as you want to the administrators you create for those divisions.

In short, BlueTie works the way a business works. It can be as rigidly hierarchical or as flat and laissez-faire as you want. And while it's simple enough to use ad hoc, it offers a number of higher-level features, like support for domain names that will let you use it as the permanent mail server for your company.