Huddle, the team collaboration solution that delivers Enterprise 2.0 tools through social business networks, announced that they have joined the OpenSAM consortium. Huddle brings true collaboration to the enterprise through a concept called Social Business Networks - combining Web 2.0 business tools with secure networks that link companies, communities and content. Huddle enables companies, partners and customers to naturally work together online and in teams.

    OpenSAM (Open Simple AJAX Mashups) is a consortium of software-as-a-service (SaaS) application vendors and a set of AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming recommendations, based on open standards that allow multiple online applications to integrate. With OpenSAM Huddle joins a group of leading online application vendors including iNetOffice, ShareMethods, EditGrid and Preezo. Huddle will launch new features and functions as well as an OpenSAM integration, next week at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, September 5 – 7.

    Huddle instantly creates a network of secure collaborative workspaces, bringing together the right people for the right project on either side of the firewall. Permissions control who sees and has access to what content. Employees can become part of a single Huddle or multiple Huddles without additional passwords. Team members are kept up-to-date with RSS, email and dashboard alerts. Huddle delivers an intranet, extranet, FTP, workflow, document and project management tools through one easy-to-use hosted service with a single sign-on and no additional software.

    "The enterprise today has moved past the fear of hosted solutions and is now looking for an effective way to deliver application suites across a global organization while at the same time controlling the costs," said David Antila of Collaborative Strategies. "Huddle is a logical platform to adopt the OpenSAM standards because it creates a dynamic network of workspaces that allow an enterprise to easily deliver and control these applications without hindering people and productivity."

     “Productvity rises when companies use Huddle to manage content, and the communications that surround it, in an effective manner that is intrinsic to the way we work together online,” said Tom Snyder, co-Founder of OpenSAM. “By joining OpenSAM, Huddle is making a commitment to offer its customers best-of-breed applications in a secure, single solution. OpenSAM is excited to work with Huddle to optimize the way SAAS applications are delivered in the enterprise.”

    OpenSAM is a set of recommendations and techniques for integrating SaaS applications into incredibly powerful and flexible solutions.
OpenSAM technical recommendations address AJAX application problems, such as:
    - Single Sign-On: Eliminates the need for users to log in separately to each online office application in a mashup.
    - Cross-Application Document and Content Sharing: Enable diverse online office applications to store documents in a single repository of a user's choice. Such storage allows a user to organize, browse, and search all of his or her documents in one location and allows all documents to participate in the workflow, sharing and other capabilities of the repository.
    - Copy and Paste: Recommendations for support of ALE (AJAX linking and embedding) improve the ability for application content to be copied and pasted from one AJAX application into another.