blueKiwi 10.5

BlueKiwi is an advanced communication platform which allows employees and external partners and customers to take part in enterprise discussions. Users are encouraged to comment on posts, they can rate and tag all kinds of content, ask questions and post quick polls and surveys. Administrators can assign different access levels for users and have some moderation features, e.g. deleting posts and contact the author. However, it is not possible for them to reorganize content (retag, move, etc.). All communication and features are bound to groups and communities, even the internal twitter like messaging service, which creates a sense of separation but could be circumvented having an enterprise-wide group with all users of the platform. There is no notion of blogs; neither on a personal nor on a group level, but the group journal in which members can post notes can be regarded as a light version of a workspace-blog. BlueKiwi focuses on enabling conversations within groups and serves this purpose well.

BlueKiwi has a new and fresh approach towards Networking & Expert Search. Each user creates a profile. Users do not have to add other people to their network or choose to follow them; instead the personal network includes all the contacts they share a group with. Based on a user’s interaction with them (exchanging messages, reading the same articles or participating in the same discussions) a name cloud is generated that visualizes a personal network and the strength of the connection of the people within it. The Social Media Engagement module gives users the option to include basic social media monitoring and publishing features in discussions. Up to now, Twitter-accounts and -searches can be embedded in posts or assigned as tasks, and the API supports the Seesmic Desktop. User profiles include contact information, an “About me” and personal tags (downloadable as vCard) and can be enriched with information from online social networks (e.g. linkedIn). Very convenient is the tag-promotion feature which allows people to easily endorse another person’s expertise. Moreover people may present their professional and educational background on a personal welcome page and “Resume”, where experts can easily be found through keyword search.

BlueKiwi is not intended to serve as a project management tool. However, it offers some features that can be used for some light project management such as an event calendar, tasklists and event creation. Communities can be set up as project groups or can have smaller "sub-communities" allowing some members to work on subjects without bothering everybody. The task management allows members to create tasks for the entire community, or assign them to one or more members. Members can see the list of unassigned tasks and when they can help, they can take on the task themselves and inform the entire community that they are working on the task. The tasks have different color codes depending on their urgency. Nevertheless, other solutions serve better here in this category and offer detailed collaboration tools and workflow management.

BlueKiwi is primarily pushing their software as a service (SaaS). Still it offers an on-premise solution for deployments with more than 1000 users. The platform has a straightforward database-php-webserver architecture and consequently runs on a wide range of databases and servers including the L.A.M.P. platform (Linux, Apache, mySQL and PHP). The developers push their software towards a modular approach to suit different use cases (internal social networking, external community, social media engagement, productivity). Clustering is supported and scaling according to the experience with large accounts not an issue. The software is available in 5 languages: German, English, Spanish, French and Italian.

BlueKiwi supports Single Sign On (SSO) and provides LDAP or Active Directory integration. Assuming authentication and self governance, there is not much top-down administration functionality. Administrators can define groups as public, private or secret and assign the user roles owner, author and reader, but that’s about it. The emphasis of the platform is on ad hoc sharing which explains why it lacks publishing or moderation workflows. There is no lifecycle management and only basic repository service for “wikidocs”. Compared with other products, administrative powers are more constraint.

Strategic- and technical consulting is offered directly by blueKiwi, but due to their limited resources they also rely on a number of system integrators and consulting partners. Though there is some expertise among the customers and integrators of blueKiwi, there is no broad community support for the product. The company provides a complete Service Level Agreement (SLA) and support is included in the yearly subscription fee. Beside the workday support hotline there is an online customer knowledge base and blueKiwi guarantees a response time of less than two hours in case of critical functionality loss.