Bloomfire

Bloomfire'd up!

Pluspunten:

I am use Bloomfire daily, it is an excellent knowledge repository for us.

Minpunten:

It requires a good, systematic approach to group, organize and find items

The way a knowledge base should be

Opmerkingen: As one of Bloomfire's early customers we saw a lot of potential with this platform. I was in charge of conducting a report comparing some of the available products to satisfy our need for a customer-facing knowledge base. It had to be relevant, easy to use, and fast. We had a lot of undocumented information that our customers needed with no way to provide it. Some of our most important criteria included having an API and SSO (we were going to have our users log in from our customer portal site), an easy editor, fast and powerful search, user management, reporting, and so on. Bloomfire came out on top. Fast forward a few months into using it and we were well on our way generating content, marketing the tool, and getting comfortable with the platform. I was probably the main contributor to a lot of the content, so the almost daily use of the tool caused me to find areas of improvement. I worked a bit with the Bloomfire development team with a list and I'm happy to say that today, nearly every one of my suggestions have been implemented in some way. This demonstrates the company's willingness and capabilities to adapt to their customer's needs. Their team has always been helpful and communicative and would love to see continual improvements in the future.

Pluspunten:

Clean, easy to user interface. Enough features to still be powerful and handle lots of information, posts, questions, and media.

Minpunten:

At some point the cost model drastically changed from unlimited to number of users and for our company, the cost was prohibitive from expanding or growing. For other platforms that are not just a standalone knowledge base, but instead include one as a part of their services there is much more value for similar features.

Recent Updates Diminish Value of Product Usability

Opmerkingen: The initial experience was extremely positive, the recent updates significantly reduce the usefulness of the product specifically where tables and embedded documents are concerned.

Pluspunten:

We use the system as a knowledge base to inform our ongoing software implementations and keep our Support team up to speed on current functionality. I love that articles/posts are really easy to create and categorize. The search functionality works well which makes finding information very easy.

Minpunten:

The product allows you to embed documents and create tables into posts. Unfortunately, a recent update to the user interface reduces the size of the article to about 1/3 the width of a monitor. As a result, tables and embedded documents are extremely difficult to read as the formatting is severely impacted. I am not sure how to post screenshots. I have escalated to our site administrator who was informed by Bloomfire support that there is no way to revert the settings. Given that we use the system as a knowledge base, we use tables extensively to summarize information for quick and simple digestion. We also regularly embed word documents, PDFs, and Excel files. The new layout/format makes those embedded documents unreadable without extensive zooming or direct downloading of the articles. Prior to this change, the product met our needs and was highly functional. That is no longer the case.

Sharing Knowledge On Demand

Opmerkingen: Chief Outsiders uses Bloomfire to ensure our fractional Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Sales Officers can gain knowledge from each other as rapidly and easily as possible. Our clients get the best outcomes from us when we leverage the power of our Tribe of seasoned marketing and sales professionals, and Bloomfire makes it easy to collaborate and learn from each other - at the moment when a client situation calls for it. As a result, we can get the information we need to do a great job for a client on demand, as needed. The Bloomfire search function is essential to that expeditious learning process.

Pluspunten:

Bloomfire’s search functionality works infinitely better than the folder/file structure of alternatives. Search does not require an understanding of the filing structure, so all users can benefit without the need for training on filing nomenclature and structure. Bloomfire makes it easier for our 110+ fractional Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Sales Officers to learn from each other as a result.

Minpunten:

I would love to see an integration between Bloomfire and Dropbox so that documents in Dropbox could be read by the Bloomfire engine without actually having to be moved into the Bloomfire database.

A work in progress

Opmerkingen: I need to preface this: I do not use bloomfire often. My co-workers use it far more, I simply provide support when they have an issue. The cause for the title of this review is this: for what little I use of it I see the company makes an effort to add features that the community asks for and while there are things about bloomfire I am not fond of I recognize that they will work that out in time. Also I do not see the cost breakdown for how much our license costs the company so I am not really qualified to give credit to "Value for Money". Finding information through bloomfire is quick and efficient. The posting features are simultaneously robust and incomplete. You can make series of posts to group together work on broad swaths of content on a topic, you can add and remove contributors to give accurate credit. Users can ask and answer questions in a moderated environment. All wonderful. You cannot bulk change contributors (When a member of your staff leaves the company you have to manually edit each of their posts to move the content to new users before deleting the account so information is not lost and even then any answers they have posted will be lost once the account is removed). When crafting a post all text and formatting will shift significantly when publishing ( goes from single line spacing to double or more line spacing, also all of the margins get a 1 to 2 inch shift depending on the size of your monitor, and formatting options are limited). Copy/pasting content from Word or gDocs generally requires a fair amount of re-formatting the content as the editor will either not retain any formatting or will interpret it in a odd way.

Pluspunten:

The platforms capacity for moderated knowledge sharing. Search tools work well and there are a number of different ways users can upload content

Minpunten:

Lack of functionality in text formatting tools. Lack of ability to bulk modify posts (recategorize, add/remove users, etc).