What IBM should do to improve IBMVerse.com
by Volker Weber
As I explained in my post Verse beyond Powerpoint it is currently not really possible to experience the power of Verse. But IBM could take a few hints from Microsoft how to make it work. Microsoft got the onboarding right.
- When you sign up for Outlook.com, Microsoft will import your existing Gmail account. Your mail, your contacts, your calendars.
- Microsoft lets you register mail aliases. You can use them to send mail "on behalt of". Even when using mobile clients. Outlook.com lets me send mail as vowe@vowe.net.
- I can forward incoming mail from Gmail and then reply from Outlook.com. So it's not a one-time import, but from that day on my mail keeps flowing. As explained above, I can even reply with my existing mail address.
- Outlook.com has no quota. You can store as much email as you like. There are restrictions on how many mails you can send. As you use the service, these limits are relaxed. Microsoft learned from Hotmail.com how to keep spammers out.
Once you get past the setup process, there are quite a few useful features to discover. Sweep comes to mind. And the big fat undo button you see above.
One more thing: You don't take servers down for maintenance these days anymore. Maybe in an enterprise, but not as an Internet cloud service provider. Not unless you have complete failover that is transparent to the user. You switch the service on, and then you never switch it off. And for those cases where you fail, you prepare a better explanation than this.
Comments
I agree with this article.
I was exploding with excitement to try out Verse as IBM's marketing team made it sound like #thenewwaytowork was going to be the next best thing to sliced bread.
My day consists of email. 90% of the time.
My positive comments on Verse are:
1) Great interface.
2) Sending/Receiving email is FAST.
3) I find the anti-spam filtering better than GMAIL or Office365.
4) It's affordable for small companies like mine.
My negative comments are:
1) Signing-in is a pain. I prefer Safari, but now I'm forced to use Chrome for example.
2) There is no migration/import from Google APPS, Office 365 or any other email provider.
3) Cannot relay emails via a 3rd party SMTP (our emails get branded).
4) Creating signatures is basic. So you left with a very plain looking company signature.
5) Those "important people" icons I find to be a PAIN as only people in your organisation have profile images. A list of "empty" icons with the Initials on is distracting.
6) Team analytics only work internally. So, not much point for my small company.
7) Action Items/To-Do's don't always work. It's actually difficult to check what you need to follow-up on. I was under the impression it's automated. Or some kind of a reminder?
8) There is IMAP support - so I can get the account to work on my iPhone etc. But no push notifications (Like Google or Office365). Battery life is bad because my phone is constantly checking for new email.
9) If you don't like the web interface, you can use Outlook. But then... Why have Verse in the first place?
10) Changing MX records etc needed some investigation work to find what to do.
11) Overall the documentation/help is very "technical". Aimed at large corporate who have IT staff. Not for small companies doing self-setups.
I'm left VERY disappointed...
