The rise of SaaS has led to a new breed of cloud-based enterprise content management systems that focus on people & collaboration. These systems borrow useful features, such as comment threads and an event stream, from consumer social networks. Huddle is leading in this space and is now displacing traditional incumbents, such as SharePoint.

1. Huddle Sync: Enterprise scale

2. Huddle Sync: Enterprise scale
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 ECM moves to the cloud and becomes more social
1 The rise of consumer cloud sync tools
1 The enterprise challenge
2 Huddle: Bridging the ECM and sync worlds
3 Solving the data volume problem
3 About Huddle

3. ECM MOVES TO THE CLOUD AND BECOMES MORE SOCIAL
The rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) and the cloud has led to a new breed of cloud-
based enterprise content management systems that focus on people and collaboration.
These systems borrow useful features, such as comment threads and an event stream,
from consumer social networks. Huddle is leading in this space and is now displacing
traditional incumbents, such as SharePoint.
THE RISE OF CONSUMER CLOUD SYNC TOOLS
More recently, the popular concept of the cloud has expanded from web-based SaaS
and cheap, scalable IaaS to encompass the central repository that provides data for your
applications across all devices and keeps them seamlessly in sync in the background. In
the consumer space, DropBox is probably the most successful example of this.
This approach combines the familiar user experience and offline capabilities of keeping
applications and data local, with the centralized, access anywhere, cross-platform
benefits of SaaS web apps. It is no surprise that tools like DropBox are very popular for
syncing personal files between devices and some people are starting to use these tools
in the workplace.
THE ENTERPRISE CHALLENGE
Enterprise content management and collaboration is a very different problem to personal
file management. The focus in the enterprise is on sharing information with large groups
of people and working on content collaboratively with others, while maintaining security
and control over corporate data that large enterprises require. This presents a number of
issues when trying to use consumer and SMB sync tools in an enterprise context.
SECURITY
Large corporates require much higher standards of security than consumer tools can
offer. This is not just about securing systems, but being able to prove the tools’ security
credentials to IT security officers looking to purchase fit for purpose software.
AUDIT
In a team collaborative environment, audit trails are a useful tool for tracking who made
which changes to what content. In a larger enterprise environment, audit trails become
essential security controls and are often required for legislative compliance. This is not
something that is important for personal sync and, as such, is not a feature found in
consumer or even SMB sync tools.
PERMISSIONS
Managing who can see what content is straightforward, or rather a non-existent problem
for personal sync, even with small teams, it is not much more complicated. Users can
explicitly name a list of people they would like to share a document with. At scale,
this approach becomes completely unmanageable though. To maximize the reuse of
intellectual capital within a large organization, you want to share content as widely as
possible, rather than limit it to a few named people. This will inevitably mean sharing with
teams or roles, where the actual people involved change over time. Consumer tools are
not designed to do this, or to offer fine-grained controls over what actions each group of
users can perform on an item.
COMPANY WIDE SEARCH
A particular irritation for custodians of corporate data are “digital islands”. These
are pockets of data that are not joined up, or even known about by colleagues.
The introduction of consumer sync tools by individuals or small teams across the
organization quickly makes it impossible to search all corporate data for useful content,
or to keep track of what data is stored where.
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4. USER MANAGEMENT
For small businesses, the volume of new starters and leavers or people changing roles
is very small and can be handled by ad-hoc, manual processes. At even 100 employees
this is no longer feasible. At enterprise scale, the number of people moving around and
the number of systems they need access to means that integration and automation
becomes necessary.
GROUPS AND SHARING
Much like the issues with permissions and search outlined above, at scale it becomes
much harder to define the group of people that you want to share content with. It is very
unlikely to be an explicit list of names and more likely to be defined groups, such as
“the sales team” or “the team working on project x”.
DATA VOLUME
Finally, but perhaps most significantly for a sync product, there is the issue of data
volume. Personal sync tools allow you to synchronize a few gigabytes of files between
your desktops and laptops, and you can select a subset of those files to be available on
mobile devices. At the small team level, this can run to tens of GBs of files that are each
only relevant to a subset of the team. At true enterprise scale, the corporate data store
runs to many terabytes. This is particularly true if the organization has succeeded in
liberating useful content, which represents valuable intellectual property, from people’s
C drives and inboxes and made them available in a central store. Syncing that amount
of data to everyone’s desktop is simply impractical and even more problematic for
mobile devices. This is where enterprise sync really starts to fall apart.
HUDDLE: BRIDGING THE ECM AND SYNC WORLDS
Most of the problems outlined above (with the exception of data volume) are solved
“out of the box” by Enterprise Content Management systems and, as the leader of the
new generation of such tools, Huddle is no exception.
SECURITY
Huddle is built from the ground up with security and availability in mind. Numerous
governments trust Huddle to store sensitive, classified information. All communication
with Huddle is encrypted (256-bit SSL); access can be revoked for a specific device and
all content deleted remotely.
AUDIT
All actions by users are fully audited and this is baked into the product from the outset.
PERMISSIONS
Permission groups and fine-grained controls at folder level produce great flexibility in
both permission settings and on-going permissions management.
COMPANY-WIDE SEARCH
Full-text search is available across all workspaces and full API support allows
integration with other enterprise search products.
USER MANAGEMENT
Users can be easily added to and removed from groups or workspaces. Huddle also
offers Active Directory integration for user authentication.
GROUPS AND SHARING
The workspace model is a core part of what makes Huddle work at enterprise scale.
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5. While these features are common amongst ECM products, Huddle is the first tool to
combine enterprise content management and sync. Huddle Sync offers enterprise-
grade content management features with user-friendly and seemingly magical file sync
tools. This final step in usability removes the last remaining barrier to replacing the
network drive with a version-controlled, cloud-based alternative.
SOLVING THE DATA VOLUME PROBLEM
The key piece that allows Huddle to solve file sync at enterprise scale, however, is our
answer to the data volume problem. Our research shows that users only require offline
access to a tiny proportion of the corporate data store, but they do not know which files
they may need access to.
Based on the analysis of many years of data on usage patterns within Huddle itself, we
have developed a set of algorithms that can predict – in order of likelihood – which
files a user is most likely to need access to. Huddle Sync then syncs these files in
advance to users’ devices. The probability scoring allows us to make efficient use of
the storage space available on the device. Only the highest scoring files are pushed
to mobile devices, which have limited storage, while syncing many more to desktop
devices with larger hard drives.
Although originally conceived to solve the sync data volume problem at enterprise
scale, Huddle Sync’s content recommendations algorithms have become a great way
for users to discover relevant content they may not otherwise have known to look
for. This provides the beginnings of a revolutionary approach to content search and
discovery within the enterprise.
ABOUT HUDDLE
Established in November 2006 and based in London and San Francisco, Huddle is the
leader in Enterprise Collaboration and Content Management in the cloud.
With Huddle, you can manage projects, share files and collaborate with people inside
and outside of your company, securely. It is available online, on mobile devices, on
the desktop, via Microsoft Office applications, major business social networks and in
multiple languages. Simply: if SharePoint was built today, they would’ve built Huddle.
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