New Zealand :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

Question: how do I frame a blog post for this solo professional, working from home focused site, when the subject is how my company has been appointed a partner for a product which is really an Enterprise 2.0, collaboration, social media platform?

Not really work from home stuff, is it?

At first I thought not. Then, because I really wanted to share my good news here and knew that some readers and subscribers would otherwise miss that news, I mulled it over and came up with at least two reasons why the story is appropriately included here.

But first, the basic story is that last week, the Colorado Springs headquartered ITBrix LLC announced that my company had been appointed as solution providers for the ITBrix WordFrame Community 1.0 platform, with a regional focus – China, South East Asia, Australasia. There is a “social media release” version of the press release, with summaries and related links, on my deswalsh.com site.

Now, relevance to home based business?

OK. First, there is the fact that the technology that makes a product like WordFrame also makes it possible for me to have, from a home office in a still fairly sleepy holiday town on the edge of a tourism centre in east coast Australia, a base for a regional business, indeed a global business. That for me is a pretty cool consideration in its own right.

Second, there are lots of others like me, or people in small groups in small offices, but who belong to professional or business associations, or, like me, have partnerships and strategic alliances which jump across the old barriers of distance and time. WordFrame, or other social media, collaboration, document management platforms, can work for them/us, at least as well as for companies and organizations in traditional, central city office buildings, manufacturing plants and other “regular” work environments.

Accountancy practices, for example, are often in the small, even solo business sector. So the adoption of the WordFrame Community platform by the Institute of Chartered Accountants, England and Wales (ICAEW) shows how WordFrame can work for a group of professionals in independent businesses.

If you are a member of an organization or professional group and would like to see how the WordFrame Community platform could help you collaborate more effectively, why not organize a demo for yourself and some colleagues? Just contact me and I’ll get back to you with the details.

Look, we know we Aussies don’t have a big population compared to giants like the USA and China.

But we are people. We have feelings.

And we like things that are free.

Or seem to be.

Like ThinkFree Online, which is free – unless you happen to be Australian. In which case you have to deal with the big telco, Telstra, via its BigPond online service. If you aren’t a BigPond subscriber, tough.

How I discovered this was that I noticed today that Ismael Ghalimi, the authority on Office 2.0, uses three of the ThinkFree tools on a daily basis. That reminded me that Tris Hussey had enthused about ThinkFree a few months ago and had organised for me an invitation to test the ThinkFree Premium product he was using. As it turned out, I was not able to use that invitation, because I had problems with signing on and after a couple of emails from ThinkFree support asking me details such as what OS I had, I heard no more.

Life moves on, but I did think today, after spending some time on Ismael’s site, that it would be good to have another look.

Here’s what I saw at first:

Not just one “Free” – five (count ‘em) “Free” things. Great!

And just to reinforce that, over on the right hand side of the screen was another declaration that this was free stuff.

OK, time to sign up.

Then look what happened. A notice that I’m being shunted off to BigPond.

And the message was unambiguous: ThinkFree Online is available as BigPond Office Online for BigPond Members only in Australia and New Zealand.

Huh? Just noticed – they dropped the Kiwis in too. What did they do to deserve that?

More out of curiosity than any vain hope that there might be another story on the other side of the “Sign Up” page, I clicked the button.

Definitely no ambiguity there. “Only @BigPond.com and @BigPond.net.au email addresses will be accepted”. You’re not a paid-up BigPond subscriber, you don’t get to play with ThinkFree.

Well, I’m not about to switch my Internet access account over to BigPond just to try ThinkFree. So I guess I must wave goodbye to the opportunity to use this apparently quite excellent product.

Maybe ThinkFree could change the notices on their home page to say “Free…except for Australians and New Zealanders”.

‘cos if you have to have a BigPond account to access it, it ain’t free.

Or is this the model ThinkFree are using for the rest of the world – i.e those of us outside North America? A series of deals with local providers to lock up the service from anyone who isn’t one of their paid subscribers?