Huddle has an app for iPhone web conferencing

If there’s one thing that recent ZDNet reviews of Microsoft Office Web Apps is likely to leave you thinking about, it should be collaboration. With this in mind, I noticed this week’s news from online enterprise collaboration player Huddle.net purporting that its new iPhone app and web conferencing offerings put the company head-to-head with WebEx, Lotus and Box.net.

Well, although I know WebEx works pretty well as I have a client who uses it often, the company is usually ranked somewhere in the deep left bottom ‘oh yuk – don’t touch’ quarter of the Gartner magic quadrant for these technologies. Lotus I was force fed for two years when I worked for an IBM supplier and I’ve been thankfully free of it ever since. NB: I know it’s powerful and well built, but it’s just painful for most of us isn’t it? Finally, Box.net – I have to confess I don’t know well enough to comment on. So hardly a glowing set of three to go head-to-head against is it?

What Huddle does do well is provide a hosted suite of live tools in a single app – and because it’s a pretty thoroughbred web 2.0 beast, it offers features like unlimited users for free so that it can scale from small teams to large enterprise deployments for a comparatively low cost.

But integration with Microsoft Office, wouldn’t you have expected them to have provided that before now wouldn’t you? I guess not, perhaps that's why Microsoft has tried so hard to do what Google docs never quite seemed to be able to pull off with its new baby. What users obviously want is the ability to use collaboration tools to access documents stored online directly from their desktop applications and this is the direction that both Huddle and Microsoft are pushing for.

Huddle in fact has been working with that large software company on the US far North West cost more closely than you might think. “Through the Microsoft BizSpark program, Huddle has been able to leverage a variety of tools and technologies including Microsoft Office to create a better experience for their customers,” said Dan’l Lewin, corporate vice president of Emerging Business Development at Microsoft.

No misspelling – he really does use an apostrophe in his name.

As well as web conferencing that integrates directly with your Outlook or Google calendar (I don’t use either so I’m not sure why this is a sales plug), Huddle says that its price is currently the lowest available on the market and that it can be also accessed on other cell phones by using third party applications such as Clustr if you so wish – and its iPhone app offers, “Access to document sharing, project tasks, discussions and whiteboards, as well as a complete view of the user's personalised dashboard.”

This all sounds superb, I just wish I could afford an iPhone so I could try some of this stuff. I do think that this is interesting news to follow though and I’ll tell you why. Travelling a huge amount as I do, I am constantly playing with a mix of netbook, oversized MacBook Pro and an ageing Palm Treo as I desperately search for free WiFi hotspots from Surrey to Mauritania. Once this web 2.0 type of technology finally comes of age I will gladly buy in to it. I need to be better connected. For now though, I’ll take a slightly sceptical backseat if it’s all the same to you folks.