Huddle Adds Productivity Apps to Cloud Collaboration Service

Five Apps to Boost Worker Efficiency

First came the ability to directly store documents in the cloud, now end users can create and edit them without having to rely on traditional productivity applications such as Microsoft Office.

Huddle, a provider of a file synchronization and collaboration service in the cloud, this week unfurled Huddle Note, a suite of applications that allows end users to create content directly within Huddle using any device.

According to Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell, Huddle Note is designed to decrease the reliance end users have today on productivity applications that weren’t designed with the cloud in mind. Rather than having to fire up Microsoft Word to, for example, create a document when travelling, Huddle Note allows end users to create a document that can be directly stored and shared via the Huddle collaboration service.

Huddle Note, says Mitchell, will not completely eliminate the need for end users to create complex documents and spreadsheets using traditional productivity applications. But it does reduce the number of instances where those applications are required, and also the actual number of employees in the enterprise that need those apps.

Microsoft Office and other such productivity apps are among the most expensive in the enterprise. End users may not be ready to give those applications up just yet. But Huddle is betting that over time, many end users are going to deem such apps to be too cumbersome to use in a cloud age that prizes simplicity above all else.