Land of Zoho Creator

This past week I had the opportunity to chat with Andy McLoughlin, co-founder and product director of Huddle, a very useful and well-designed web-based collaboration application that uses Zoho’s remote API. Huddle intrigued me initially  because of its similarities (from a user’s perspective) to MS Office Groove, a product I know too well (before and after the Microsoft acquisition). I am now using Huddle daily. Here is my list of features that make Huddle worthwhile as a collaboration tool for small teams:

1. Workspaces keep your information in context. Workspaces are invitation-only containers of data and tools where participants collaborate. They work best for small teams (15 people or less) where every person contributes.  Workspaces  compartmentalize your projects, which is particularly handy when dealing with multiple entities or being involved in different projects.
2. File Sharing works better than email attachments. Workspaces include a Files tool for uploading or creating Office documents online that are shared among the participants, thus avoiding the potential conflicts that arise when circulating documents as email attachments. If you are a developer, this functionality is also a good example of how Zoho’s Remote API can be used by an external application to view and/or edit the documents online.
3. Discussion threads are easier to follow than email. The forum-style Discussion tool available with Huddle workspaces makes it easy to follow issues when there is a succession of questions and answers around a specific subject.
4. Tasks viewed by all team members help keep the project on track. This tool with the Ical feed option is a project manager’s best friend.
5. The Whiteboard is a good place to develop an idea. The Whiteboard is a wiki-style tool for when you want to develop and idea and keep everything in one place. It’s also the right tool if you want to keep a journal or log your daily or weekly activities and notes and share them with your team.
6. Alerts via RSS feeds are convenient and non-intrusive.While Huddle provides a mechanism to notify people via email when something has been added to a workspace, it is the RSS subscription that makes most sense, as a  non-obtrusive way of receiving and reviewing information.
7. The Rest. There is also audit trail and version control, selective access to files and Search, which I mention mainly because none of these ever made it into Groove and they would’ve made most Groove users very happy.

In summary, the real benefit of using Huddle (imo) is being able to bring teams together quickly under the same roof (i.e. the workspace) and provide them with a set of complementary tools (i.e. Files, Discussions, Whiteboard, Tasks) to move their agenda forward, starting from a clean slate (and all from a browser).

And now the one wish for the Huddle team - the ability to embed Zoho Creator Forms into Huddle workspaces. Or for the Zoho team - a remote API for Zoho Creator.