Collaborating collaboration tools

The inevitable side issue of the BYOD movement is the way in which users have not only taken to the smartphones and tablets that they want to use, but also the many cloud-based services available to them that add capabilities such as collaboration to mix.

Tools such as Box and DropBox, Twilio, SharePoint and the rest all offer ways in which individuals can communicate and collaborate with others, which is a vital business capability. Indeed, the rate at which users have adopted these tools – and created links between them – has far out-stripped the capabilities of many business IT departments to integrate them into their own operations.  

This is a market that is now being targeted by US vendor,Cloud Elements, which has created a `one-to-many’ integration platform called Documents Hub. The company’s aim is to provide a single application programming interface (API) for applications and service developers. Using it, they can then connect cloud applications with some of the leading document and cloud storage services: Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, and Microsoft SharePoint.

The key to the Cloud Elements approach is what the company calls `Elements’.  These are extensions and APIs that target building integrations between different cloud services as easily and quickly as possible. The company is targeting both corporate IT teams and SaaS developers who are seeking to tie their applications with other cloud services. Previously, this meant writing custom integrations which then have to be kept updated. This is not made any easier by the fact that different cloud document storage vendors have their own APIs which they then update to meet their own development requirements.

Services can be provisioned using the Cloud Elements monitoring and logging console. This provides real-time visibility into the performance and availability of these services. It allows users to create one API and connect to all the leading services in the Documents Hub. This then provides the ability to search, store, retrieve and manage documents and files across these services.

The Elements support multi-tenant applications, and one Element can manage connections with an unlimited number of instances of each service. This means users can have thousands of Google Drive or Box accounts connecting with an application.

The Document Hub also interacts seamlessly with the Cloud Elements Messaging Hub, providing simple API calls to manage attachments contained in Email and SMS messages.