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Lotus Bluehouse From IBM Launches Into Beta

Project collaboration and meeting software has to be the most crowded space in the web application market, mainly due to its necessity. Coworkers collaborate all day long. Sharing files is essential. Each company with collaboration software is targeting its own specific niche with its own specific feature set, and Lotus Bluehouse is no different.

IBM has been working to free itself from its own brand image for many years, and their Lotus team is leading the charge. Even though Lotus is responsible for some heinous software interfaces, the teams working on the new Lotus web apps are nothing like the old IBM or the old pre-acquisition Lotus that is responsible for Notes. Even with the recent Notes redesign I don’t think that software is ever going to get any less ugly, so fortunately Lotus is putting all their quality resources into new projects.

Enter Lotus Bluehouse, a web-based meeting and collaboration app aimed towards the SMB market. If Basecamp is for the Fortune 5,000,000 then perhaps Bluehouse will do well for the Fortune 500,000 market.

At its heart, Bluehouse is a place for people to share work experiences with each other and collaborate with others, inside or outside their company. There are 6 main areas of the Bluehouse app:

• Store & Share - Upload and share files.
• Live Charts - Create charts and visualizations from your data.
• Activities - Fancy to-do list.
• Meetings - Screen-sharing meeting software. Invite others, host your own, etc.
• Forms - Interesting form creation and editing app. Not as well-done as Wufoo, but then again, who is?
• Chat - IM and chatroom support for communicating with colleagues.

Right now it’s a free signup as they’re still in beta, and I’m pretty sure the ceiling may fall down at any moment, but hey, that’s the fun with beta software.