Secure Tweets: Three Business Apps Rated

Socialtext is priced at $15 (£10) per user per month with volume pricing available. It is offered in both a hosted SAAS model or as an internally deployed appliance system.

Huddle

Huddle, which is available at huddle.net, is probably the most classic business collaboration application of the three evaluated. In many ways, Huddle is similar to traditional collaboration offerings such as Basecamp and Microsoft SharePoint.

But Huddle also includes some new capabilities, especially when it comes to connecting with and working alongside newer technologies.

Much of the focus of Huddle is around project, file and task management. Huddle workspaces can be used to manage and collaborate on a number of projects and events.

The Huddle dashboard offered a good view into current tasks, projects and workspaces that users were participating in. Once launched into a workspace, a set of additional tools was available.

Within Huddle, tasks could be assigned and tracked, meetings could be scheduled (and even carried out using the free Huddle teleconferencing service), and threaded discussions could take place for each project. A whiteboard feature provided basic but effective wiki capabilities.

The file management capabilities in Huddle were quite good, allowing for sharing and collaborative editing of a wide variety of files and making good use of the Huddle security model to control access. In the case of Microsoft Office documents, an online viewer made it possible to view content without downloading it to a system.

The social networking aspects of Huddle are very basic, providing only standard information about other employees in the system. However, this may not be so important, as Huddle can be used from directly within other social networking systems.

One aspect of Huddle is its ability to be plugged into networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. This means that if your employees are going to be spending time within Facebook anyway, they’ll at least be able to track work and projects within Huddle while they are also keeping tabs on their Facebook friends.

Pricing for Huddle is based on number of workspaces, amount of file storage permitted and other premium features. (All versions allow unlimited users.) A basic free version allows one workspace, displays ads in the browser and has no secure connection. For $20 (£13) a month, five workspaces, more storage and secure connections are available. Two higher tiers offer more features, and volume business pricing is also offered.

Jim Rapoza is chief technology analyst at eWEEK.