Huddle's Blog

Huddle Sync – The world’s first intelligent sync tool for the enterprise

Posted on 21. Feb, 2012 by Alastair in Announcements, Huddle

It’s not often that you get to announce a genuine world first, but I am delighted to say that with the launch of the Huddle Sync private beta program, today is one of those days.  Here at Huddle, our goal is to revolutionize enterprise content management and collaboration by providing a single secure platform upon which anyone can store, share and work on content – with anyone else – on any device.

This is a noble ambition to have, but the real challenge is to actually make something that matches up to the hype; an experience that is magical and solves real problems for users, but is secure and sophisticated enough to be embraced by the CIO and IT department. What we’re announcing today is exciting because it does all three:

• Makes it very simple to get content into and out of the cloud, with just one click from your laptop or phone. This is file sync built for the enterprise from the ground up.

• Makes sync secure; so that both you and your CIO can be sure that important company information doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

• Relevant documents, when you need them, on any device. You can now have the files you actually need at your fingertips, without having to spend hours searching your inbox, the desktop of your work PC, your personal tablet, the shared drives in the office or even your smartphone.

How? Let’s take each one in turn:

Cross-enterprise sync

We all know and love personal sync tools. It seems every day a new one is released; from Dropbox to iCloud to SugarSync. They are great because with just one click you can share files in real-time between your work and personal devices and work seamlessly from any location, with one or two people. However, such sync tools simply don’t work at an enterprise-level. They can’t cope with the volume of documents that are stored in an enterprise, the number of changes made when lots of people work on the same documents at the same time or the controls needed to make sure the right people see the correct information. According to the Aberdeen Group, the average content store for an insurance company is 120 petabytes – you can’t sync all of that to an iPhone!

Huddle Sync presents a fundamentally different approach to any other sync tool and recognizes that cross-enterprise file sync is a more complex challenge to personal file sync. Enterprises have to sync not just an individual’s data, but that of everyone across the organization and make it securely available offline on multiple devices – especially in an age where Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is becoming more prevalent in the office. Huddle Sync gives you visibility of the entire corporate knowledge store – replicating the shared drive in the cloud – and syncs the most important files to all your devices automatically. You have the latest versions of the documents you need anywhere, at any time on or offline. Not only does this mean you can see all your information in one place, it means that you can open or save information directly onto your computer like you do any other file. This will then sync it with your computer at home and share it with anyone else you are working with in Huddle. Magic!

Security

Consumer sync tools present one of the most important problems that the IT department has had to face for a couple of years. With information already stored across numerous peoples’ hard drives, USB sticks and personal inboxes, IT is already struggling to monitor and control the flow of corporate data. Personal sync tools make this problem 100 times worse. Now, people can sync corporate information to any personal device. And once it’s out, it’s out. What happens to your company’s most important information when (not if!) you lose your phone, if you buy a new iPad and sell the old one on eBay or if your personal sync tool gets hacked or goes down? The implications are terrifying.  With Huddle Sync, the IT department has visibility of where corporate data is stored, who has synced what files and full audit trails for each file. To ensure data is always secure, all transmissions to and from Huddle are encrypted at 256-bit SSL and the iPhone application’s storage is encrypted so that content cannot be accessed.

Finding the right information

To make sure you have relevant documents with you, on any device, at any time, on or offline, the Huddle team has spent 12 months building a totally new technology platform – an intelligent recommendations engine that has the potential to literally transform traditional enterprise content and knowledge management. Powered by patent-pending predictive technology, Huddle Sync’s set of learning algorithms intelligently select files that will be of most relevance to you and automatically syncs them to your device. It works on your Windows computer and iPhone now, with iPad, Android and Mac coming soon.  Why is this so great? Firstly, this intelligent technology means that, although you can see all of your content and your teams’ content in one place, it will only sync the files you actually need. This reduces the bandwidth required and doesn’t swamp your phone or laptop with files you don’t need. This also keeps your IT department happy and your mobile data charges down. Secondly, this intelligent technology not only syncs files you’ve been working on, but actually recommends information that will be of interest to you – without you having to look for it. This might be a new office policy that HR wants you to read, a purchase order you have to approve, the minutes of a meeting you were just in, or a document a colleague is working on that you might be interested in.

And this is only the start. The possibilities for this patent-pending technology for intelligent collaboration and content management are limitless. Imagine if you are working on a research paper and Huddle Sync automatically recommends that you connect with other people, not only within your company, but outside of the firewall, who have either written about or are currently working on a similar topic. It’s like LinkedIn but for content. Huddle Sync is set to transform search and traditional enterprise content management as we know it. It’s time to collaborate intelligently.

Register your interest in the Huddle Sync beta program now

Tags: byod, cloud collaboration, enterprise content management, Huddle Sync, online collaboration, online file storage