Bloomfire

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.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Empfehlung für andere Nutzer

If we had to choose a knowledge base tool today, we'd have to re-investigate the market since there are so many new tools and improvements to long standing ones. Bloomfire would not necessarily be the clear-cut choice, but we are glad to have worked with them in the previous years.

Pluses
-Easy to use and learn
-Easy to learn customization options
-Appreciate the HTML editing options

Cons
- The width of the BF doc is thinner than needed. It's very web 2012 versus today where you see wider panes. I know that it's easier to read in smaller widths but you can add the option of columns instead. Really helpful would be columns that can have images or text blocks within them.
- The change for the background to be one color. This is the common style with a lot of article based platforms (e.g. medium) but there's something off about the UI. It might be that the orientation leans to the left too much (b/c of the right side column of related content), the right side column is too large and removes focus from the main content, or that the default font is just too large (even on a mac retina pixel display, you don't get to see that much of the article display. it subtly implies more scrolling/long-ness of the article)
-You have bugs within the auto formatting detection. For example, deleting from a non-default text such as a title will change the text size to the styling of the text beforehand. Sometimes you can't get the text to return to a certain styling just from the tools bar. Instead, you have to use the html editor to correct the styling manually.
-Leaving the page (out of focus) and returning will show the cursor at the end of the page (this bug intermittently comes back).
- More formatting options like word would be preferred (specific font sizes, font colors, . For documentation purposes, formatting options allow the ease of use in highlighting or differentiating a lot of content.
- More image formatting options.
- Inserting a file takes up a bunch of space. Would prefer that adding a file is like a link or at the end like an attachment. The actual page real estate a file record takes is excessive. Also, I usually want to associate the file to some sort of text block but instead it's just floating in it's own area between two equidistant text blocks.
- Allow wiki style page of contents at the beginning of a BF page would help on complex articles.
- For the feed page, what about a table form for articles? You have tiles and a list view. I think you could optimize width by removing the filters on the side and moving them to the top or inset as part of the table's columns (when relevant) as filters.