The top 5 benefits of Huddle vs. SharePoint Online
24 February 2022
What is Huddle?
What is SharePoint?
What are the differences between Huddle and SharePoint?
- Tighter in-document control
Huddle provides a full suite of administrative controls to help you manage user authentication, access and auditing. File permissions, with multiple levels of access, can be made as granular as necessary across internal and external teams, controlling who you allow to edit and share content. The document owner is the only person who can decide which changes to incorporate.
SharePoint users are working on the master document where people can overwrite each other’s work, resulting in changes and feedback going unnoticed. There is no role distinction between co-authors and reviewers, so collaborations rely on people keeping to their own remits.
- Never lose feedback or versions of documents
Several people can work on the same document at the same time in Huddle without feedback being lost or overwritten. Everyone works on just one version of the document giving you a single source of truth. Huddle’s “document comparison” feature allows you to revisit past versions of the document and compare changes that have been made, as well as being able to look over previous comment streams. Full audit trails track all activity and simple, comprehensive administrative controls ensure you know exactly who's accessing your content and what they're doing with it.
In SharePoint, everyone is working on one version of the document, but changes are not tracked or reported automatically. It is possible to turn on ‘versioning’ so that previous versions of the document can be restored if needed, but this must be configured and may not be straightforward.
- Client portals and collaborating safely with third parties
When collaborating with people outside of your organisation, stakeholders can easily be added to your project in Huddle. The Workspace manager can control which documents they can access and what they can do within it. You can manage tasks, content, approvals and communication in one secure and accessible space. Additionally, Huddle’s Client Portal function means you can provide a branded experience for clients to upload content, review and safely share in one auditable place. This makes it a highly secure environment when working on sensitive information.
To work with third parties within SharePoint, those people must be given access to your server, which often poses security risks. It is common for users to share documents with third parties via email which again breaks down the security, especially when handling documents of a sensitive nature. There may also be conflicts between the templates of the documents being shared. SharePoint Online’s portal function sits on the organisation’s intranet with many people able to view the content contained there. Most people with access to the portal only have the ability to read or consume the content, meaning you cannot collaborate.
- Support a wider range of document formats
When collaborating across teams and with various types of content, there will likely be more than one format involved. All file types can be stored in Huddle, but it can also preview the following file types online: Microsoft Office formats, as well as formats such as PDF, plain text, rich text, OpenDocument Format (ODF), CSV images and video files. This is a standard feature and involves no extra work for the user.
As a Microsoft product, SharePoint works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as standard. It is only possible to collaborate on PDFs if SharePoint is integrated with Adobe products as you may need to configure the system to support additional non-Office formats.
- Security and compliance is locked
Huddle is ISO 27001 registered and was the first SaaS collaboration vendor to achieve FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) status, with it now having 'moderate' compliance in the US. Huddle goes a step further when it comes to security. It records a full audit trail of all the activity taking place in each document from which reports can be pulled. Data is encrypted in transit, includes multifactor authentication and enterprise-grade SSO across mobile and desktop.
SharePoint is also ISO 27001 registered and the US Government version of SharePoint has 'high' compliance for FedRAMP. Setting up SharePoint can be a laborious and confusing task if done incorrectly. This leave you open to improper configuration problems in the following areas: Disabled data encryption, no identity access management, weak passwords, lack of permission controls and insufficient or no policy awareness. You can perform an audit in SharePoint however, this does not come as a standard run feature, and you must be the site collection admin to do so.