Bloomfire

Bloomfire - Exceptional platform

Overall, we needed a knowledgebase that was better for our department. Our previous KB was a bit of a mess and very difficult to search or find any basic information. Bloomfire has been an amazing change! I would choose them everyday.

I mean, if you really hate SharePoint

One of my company's top knowledge base articles is titled "How to Search in Bloomfire" - actually we don't call it Bloomfire we call it our own internal name to stay on-brand even internally. It describes how to perform a boolean search such that you filter out the detritus that it pulls up even if you search for an article's exact name.
Also, you can be part of different access groups within Bloomfire, which allows you to keep some entries company-wide and others restricted to management or tech support. If you want to post an article in multiple groups, it actually produces multiple links which do not reference one another. So if I have access to an article in Group A and it's also in Group B, and I send someone in Group B the link that shows up on my computer - they can't open it. The software isn't smart enough to go "Ah, yes. That's the same article as the one you have access to. Let me direct you there." It should just be one link with permissions attached to it - you can open it or not. Instead it's several links, permission-specific and therefore overly complicated. Also, if you try to link articles with hyperlinks as a wiki, you better be sure that everyone is using the same links.
We also have a moderation team to sort of make the final judgement on what gets posted. My company did not hire subject matter experts for this position, so those of us who want to submit an article have to let it go through a convoluted approval process. And what if my article gets approved, and I am the author, and I decide to change it? As far as I can tell, the change requests go to a black hole and it's been literally years and I'm the only one who can see my edits to my article. Again, I think some of these have less to do with the product and more to do with my experience with my company's implementation of the product, so hopefully it will give you an idea of what not to do.

An Essential Part of our Organization!

Bloomfire has been a HUGE part of our organization. Although we have been using it for years, this last year we have undergone our largest project within the organization and Bloomfire has been our savior. It has allowed us to have a central location with all knowledge/training pertaining to this Project and the launch would not have been successful without Bloomfire! We continue to expand our use and are excited for what else is to come!

Life Insurance Company Migration

Bloomfire has been extremely helpful from the beginning. They have helped us develop a much-needed tool to accommodate all of our daily activity, content management and training needs.

Bloomfire works well for our team.

User friendly, effective and adaptable!

Quality tool

I enjoy knowing that if I type things in many times, eventually someone will know what I need..

Great Platform, Increases Engagement and Excellent Support

We use Bloomfire as an integrated component of another system. We have seen a great level of engagement and use. Integration went smoothly, including single sign on. We're using a host of groups, some of them private and it's worked out really well. Bloomfire has even fast tracked some of our more important feature requests. There are still a few kinks to be worked out with the UX and users get confused in certain cases but overall it is simple to use and one of the best platforms we've seen when exploring the landscape of available products. Would recommend.

We love Bloomfire from a development perspective.

We support our entire sales staff using Bloomfire with up to date product materials, case studies and great colaboration with our people in the field. We use bloomfire's api to dole out our manuals, technical data, images and more to our iOS and Adroid apps as well as all of our web sites. We put a document in one place (Bloomfire) and then serve it out to all others making BF our system of record!

My experience with Bloomfire

very satisfied, don't know what I would do with out it.

Knowledge Base Tool

Great product

I absolutely love this product and look forward to watching the improvements and updates that come with this product.

Great software

Its super easy to use.

it takes time to get used to learn how to search and find answers

maybe because english is my second language but it took me almost 6 months to get used to how to search things and find things on it.

Sharing Knowledge On Demand

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.

Bloomfire is amazing

Once I became comfortable with it and made it a part of my daily activities it has increased communications ten fold.

Amazing easy to use platform

Really great! Easy to use and very intuitive! Love teaching people to fish instead of giving them the fish!

Bloomfire'd up!

Education

Great

The way a knowledge base should be

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.

Enables employees with a trove of knowledge

Boomfire review

Not much

Frustratingly difficult

Frustrating

Great way to socialized sales content and news

It allowed us to have a searchable content repository of sales collateral and training as well as an announcement board for news and market research.

Good General Product

It is a nice platform. Sometimes it is hard to follow. Update changes are a little too extreme sometimes where it is hard to catch back up to the content you are seeking, especially for those who only enter it periodically. Keep the updates to a minimum, and don't change just for the sake of change to refresh. Keep the controls simple and in the same place. Eliminate the need for a new learning curve every time something changes.

The product is good, and the information is still there, but the searching and viewing gets more and more difficult with too frequent of changes you don't quickly recognize... and I am in it everyday! Maybe offer a classic view, along with your updated views when you feel the need, like Salesforce did. Change for the sake of change is not a positive thing for every day users. The updates are too frequent and clumsy.

Overall a Good Product

Like most software, there is room for improvement but this definitely gets the job done and features a sleek, clean look that all can easily enjoy and navigate.

A decent tool for Knowledge base

Overall the experience with Bloomfire has been a positive one. The centralized knowledge base has proven useful and the benefits exceed any of the drawbacks we have seen by a wide margin.

Bloomfire in the contact center

We use Bloomfire as an internal knowledge base for our customer support team. It's extremely effective in documenting best practices and updates. The social components make it easy for our team to create their own content and have it reviewed by leadership before publishing. It also makes it easy for to share and track readership over time. The comments capabilities allow us to track issues and opportunities over time, as well. We use the analytics as part of our monthly performance evaluation to ensure our team is participating and collaborating in an effort to stay abreast of whatever is changing week over week. As we've scaled up, Bloomfire has helped us maintain the feel of a start-up in how we publish and disseminate updates as a department.

Positive review

Easy to use

We use it to house all of the information for a product that I license. We share information across the user base, add articles and find relevant information about using the tools that we license.

Good knowledge base tool

We found implementation very straightforward. We converted a trial account into a live account after about a month of experimentation. After publishing some internal standards for publishing we then started uploading documents from directory drives which made them searchable and much easier for our non-technical staff to locate.

Blomfire Review

Very good for locating information quickly.

Bloomfire Review

I have had some good and bad experience with this product, my company uses it for our clients and most of the are tech savvy so its pretty easy to use for them. The only negative impact was when we merged 2 different sites into one, all of the old outdated articles appeared at the top of the lists and buried all new relevant articles.

The best software I've ever used for my position.

I know I don't use Bloomfire anywhere near to its full potential, but it is still the best software tool I have found to help me in helping me manage corporate, product, and technical information for my company. I am a proposal director and use Bloomfire as a database to store all of our RFP questions and responses - along with important attachments and informational documents. The search features make it easy for me to find the exact information I need when pursuing a new client opportunity. It also allows my company's subject matter experts to review and update the posts as the product evolves.

trust in bloomfire

my experience with bloomfire has met my expectations

Bloomfire

While there's a lot I could speak to in terms of the product itself, specifically, I recently had an amazing customer support interaction with Bloomfire. I submitted a question/suggestion about something I was unaware was currently already an available feature in Bloomfire. I submitted my request, and within an hour, I had a phone call and voicemail from Chad, Director of Client Success, with an answer. Because I didn't pick up, he also sent me a follow-up email, which included a screencap video walking me through the process. I was pretty blown away by this level of fast and efficient customer support, which only makes me more of a supporter of the Bloomfire platform. Thank you for being a trusted source for in sharing information and resources!

Director of Playout and Delivery

We selected Bloomfire from the many knowledge management systems out there for ease of use, low administration overhead and web-based access. Over the 3 years, we have been using it we have moved from minimal adoption to wholesale adoption by our sales, systems architecture and customer service teams, safe in the knowledge that we made the right choice.

Not the sexiest but good enough

The default layout with thumbnails feels a little basic and not too appealing. It gets the job done and addresses what I need. I like the search but for my company to use a "blog" style central info store... can get quite infuriating.

Blooming your business

Bloomfire is very use to use and share information across the board with everyone on your team. They offer straight forward layouts and templates for your posts which you can edit at anytime from any device. So everyone can have access to the most recent information.

My daily go-to resource

I use Bloomfire every day. I keep training documents, desk level procedures and the forms our office uses in Bloomfire. It is a very easy software to use, and it fosters collaboration between our different teams.

Greatest Collaboration Portal on Earth

As a fast growing company, a location for training, sharing of ideas, storage for videos - documentation - and etc. is crucial to providing right now access. Love Bloomfire. The ability to upload and create content is sophisticated, seamless, and can learn in 15 seconds.

Bloomfire makes it difficult to distinguish between knowledge base and training materials.

The organizational features of Bloomfire are not very easy to use when you have a large set of internal training materials.

Bloomfire fit our needs exactly!

We were looking for an internal and external knowledge base and wanted to be able to write one post but control where it would be seen. Adding rich content, like videos, and pre-written documents was just what we needed. After we had a rich library of content, we were able to make use of series and direct our clients to information by simply including a link in our correspondence. Discoverability was also important so that our clients could find relevant information quickly. Transcribing videos and the ability to search within attached documents is very powerful for those needs.

RVP

Enjoyed it.

Improve User Experience

I've found that within internal and external users, the interface is not friendly. The first thing you see when logging is most recent or popular assets and it doesn't allow you to quickly to go what you're looking for unless you type in search the name of the asset.
There should be a better catalog, or category within the first page, allowing the users to easily look up and find what they're looking for, vs. spending time finding keywords.

Excellent Tool for Knowledge Sharing

Our organization has used Bloomfire for a number of years. At first we used it as our internal company portal -- all things LIVESTRONG including HR docs, IT policies/procedures, etc. It has grown into quite the space where professional and personal recommendations and conversations can occur. And it's easy as pie. As the Director of Technology, I can honestly say that Bloomfire is one of the easiest web apps to get all of our staff up and running on.

We have now expanded our use and have created a separate community for some of our most ardent supporters, who are across the globe. They were using Facebook but transitioned to Bloomfire over a year ago -- and haven't looked back.

Keeping staff informed and making finding what you need easier.

Being able to be uniform and everyone using the same papers and forms.

Great improvement for the organization

Great Knowledge Base

My Startup size company uses Bloomfire and I absolutely love it. It has a great user experience and the UI is better looking than other knowledge bases I've seen, which look more like a file directory tree. I love being able to record videos within Bloomfire, drop in files or images, and add sections.

Love bloomfire!

Super easy to use and love how great it is for work use! Easy way to communicate with other co-workers that are in different offices and stay up to date on everything