The other day I was playing around with Huddle, a web-based project management and collaboration environment. A friend of mine who works at Huddle asked me what I thought. Their definition of what Huddle is is probably better than mine:
"Huddle combines group collaboration, project management and document sharing using social networking principles."
Having had a bit of a play with it myself I asked some of my colleagues at PlusNet what they thought. The consensus seemed to be that it is quite similar to BaseCamp but with more features and a more polished interface. One possible quirk for a company like us, with many different simultaneous projects, is the need to create several different Huddles which can become a little unwieldy. A quick search around the web and you find a plethora of companies trying to market similar sorts of solutions. A pretty comprehensive list of alternatives appears on whyBasecampsux. I've previously used ActiveCollab and found it very intuitive. These sorts of collaboration tools are very interesting to us because they echo many of the things we've been doing with Workplace - the system that we use to run PlusNet. Web-based collaboration tools developed using open-source software have been at the heart of our business for nearly ten years. It will be fascinating to see which solutions can prove themselves in this increasingly competitive market. Does your business use Huddle or something like it? Have you played around with it for your own projects? What do you think? UPDATE: Techcrunch also happen to have written about Huddle today.