Huddle unveils free business collaboration tool

Project management and collaboration firm Huddle has unveiled a new business offering designed to enable users to easily collaborate with external partners, agencies and customers.

The Unlimited Enterprise tool allows business users to add contacts to their Huddle accounts free of charge so they can view, comment and provide feedback on content.

The "lite users", as Huddle describes them, will only be prevented from uploading content.

Huddle contrasts its offering with Microsoft SharePoint, which requires businesses to pay to share content with external users.

"The tools people have today make it difficult for them to collaborate externally," Simon O'Kane, Huddle vice president of enterprise, told V3.

"This is why we have launched the Unlimited Enterprise offering, as a lite user can be added to a collaborative workgroup for free and then they can view and download files."

Unlimited Enterprise offers a 99.9 per cent True Uptime guarantee as well as higher levels of support than the Huddle Professional edition.

"Enterprises will have access to a dedicated individual who knows their business inside out. We will also offer them regular health checks and ongoing training," added O'Kane.

Businesses will also have access to Huddle's platform APIs in case they want to integrate content sharing capabilities with other enterprise systems, he added.

The Unlimited Enterprise offering is being sold to customers at £30 per user, per month, although O'Kane said there may be different pricing structures available to high-volume customers.

The price is double that of Huddle Professional, which costs £15 per user, per month.

Last year Huddle showed strong growth, particularly in the public sector, and in July the government even started using its own version of the collaboration tool, Huddle IL3, in a private cloud.