TELic: A blog about Technology Enhanced Learning

Huddle – online project management service

Yesterday I had a one-hour online meeting with a representative from Huddle, an online Web 2.0 service that aims to help teams of people manage projects. Each project has a workspace where team members can share files, contribute to a discussion forum, manage tasks and edit a wiki. Team members can be assigned to sub-teams and permissions assigned so that individual sub-teams can only see or edit specific parts of the workspace. This would enable a project’s clients to see only selected resources while the development team can see and edit everything except the financial details, which are only available to the project directors.The shared files have decent version control, locking to prevent simultaneous edits and easy access to previous versions.

From the University’s perspective, the key advantage would be that the system is hosted ‘in the cloud’ and that it is easy to include team members from other institutions, organisations and companies across the globe. Our current institutional systems are firmly tied to UoS logins, so document sharing on collaborative projects is usually by insecure email, with all the usual version problems that that brings.

The pricing seems very reasonable, and I can imagine that many reserach projects would find it an excellent way to share and collaborate. Dr Kenji Takeda from Engineering Sciences uses the free (limited) version with some of his students – a great idea as I suspect many of those students will encounter similar project management systems when they enter industry.