Village Gamer

Igloo Software, a cloud intranet provider, today introduced its Winter release, an update that brings a modular approach to intranet building. Igloo offers a collection of social apps, including file sharing, calendars, blogs, forums, microblogs, and wikis, which can now be used alone or in tandem with others. Companies can start with something as simple as secure file sharing and discussions, and add apps over time as their business needs evolve.

The inability for standalone cloud apps to talk to each other is a significant limitation, particularly for small and mid-market companies. According to Spiceworks, the Texas-based network for IT professionals, the average company is likely to use more than four hosted services ^{State of SMB IT 1H 2013, Spiceworks, Inc., May 29, 2013}. Igloo is a platform that combines multiple functions together to let you scale collaboration over time, while reducing the costs of managing several fragmented solutions.

“While one of the best things about cloud is the widespread democratization of technology, this can introduce a series of problems from integration and authentication to application sprawl,” said Andrew Dixon, Igloo’s Senior Vice President, Marketing and Operations. “With Igloo, companies can reduce the number of apps they use for communication and collaboration in a solution that is as easy to use as the tools they use at home.”

Start with Purpose-Built Apps: Igloo’s social apps can be used in a variety of different ways. Each app is designed to be configured by the end user, with a drag-and-drop interface and rich text editor that provides an almost limitless set of options in style and format. With Igloo’s Winter release, apps now include the ability to create prebuilt templates designed to simplify and standardize configuration. For instance, a calendar can be transformed into a vacation request form or a wiki can be used to create a library of standard policies to support basic workflows and purposeful collaboration.

Grow to a Social Intranet Platform: Apps are the building blocks. They can be combined together to form an “uber-app,” used collectively to form an all inclusive social intranet, and integrated with other line-of-business applications to provide one place to come together and work as a team. Igloo also announced a series of platform enhancements as a part of the release, including responsive design improvements for mobile access; easy, self-service integration with corporate LDAP directories to simplify user management; and new social analytics which provide recommended actions to improve user adoption.