Huddle launches all-new product version, bringing communication & files together

Huddle, the enterprise collaboration toolkit, is bringing a new product forward today. The new Huddle puts conversations and content into a single view, making for more thorough task management and workflow.

It’s cloud-based, as always, so you can view files and make changes from anywhere. And it’s social, so you can keep in constant communication with your colleagues to move a project forward.

Some changes you’ll see in the new Huddle are instant access to hi-definition PDF and Office documents and other files (no waiting for them to download), better in-app tools for document editing (again, without a download required), built-in tools for workflow and versioning, and new @mention and sharing tools for conversations.

Here’s a sneak peek at the new Huddle:

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It seems to us that Google, Asana, and a few other enterprise-targeted software companies are taking work and project/task management in roughly the same direction — to the cloud, yes, but also to a place that eliminates “work about work,” cuts down on emails and meetings, enables the mobile worker, and takes the pain out of working with documents as digital files.

We asked Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell how the new Huddle stacked up to the multiple other exciting task management tools currently available.

“Huddle is innovating in the enterprise space,” he answered. “Simple file sharing or collaboration between individuals or teams is one thing, and meeting the very complex (sometimes legally mandated) requirements of large companies with thousands of workers and millions of files is quite another.”

In fact, Huddle has for some time been exclusively focused on the needs of the enterprise (a.k.a. the customers with the most money to blow). Features like file sync, introduced earlier this year, are best suited to organizations with tons of files flying through the air and multiple tiers of management — with varying access and editing privileges for different types of documents. Your average small or medium business wouldn’t have any real need for such a tool.

“Individuals and smaller teams may find Asana, Dropbox, Box, Google, and other cloud offerings attractive, however as the quantity of content being stored, shared, and collaborated on grows and more people enter the organization, more robust tools for managing content are needed,” Mitchell said.

“Traditionally, this realm has been dominated by Microsoft SharePoint. That is changing. … We’ve long said that if Microsoft SharePoint was built today, it would have built like Huddle — and the new version of Huddle announced today shows that that’s even more true: We’ve already built the seamless cloud content management and social collaboration solution that Microsoft dreams of building with its Yammer acquisition.”

Microsoft’s falling out of favor with the enterprise was handily illustrated by the UK Meteorological Office in an interview we conducted late last year. Check it out:

“Cloud file sharing and collaboration is a very hot space and there is room for all of the aforementioned companies to be successful,” Mitchell concluded, “as long as we all continue to innovate to stay ahead of the curve of what’s needed in our space.”

Huddle took a $24 million funding round just a couple of months ago to expand its offices in the UK as well as stateside in San Francisco and New York City. The startup plans to be 200 employees strong by the end of this year.

Image courtesy of iofoto, Shutterstock