Hackpad vs. Delve and Office 365

In this article in our series that covers various popular business collaboration software tools, we compare Hackpad with Delve. Both are very useful software tools and both offer similar and different features. Hackpad was acquired by Dropbox in 2014 which means upgrades and added features will be coming soon to make it competitive with Office 365’s Delve.

Hackpad

Hackpad’s approach to collaboration is unique, well-designed, and interesting. Using Hackpad is straightforward as you have a Pad, Collection, Workspace, Pad Guest, and a Workspace Member. Pads are your content pages, Collections are labels to help keep things organized within teams, Workspaces are the places where you and your colleagues can share and collaborate. Workspace members have access to every pad in a workspace as a user. Pad Guests are those users who are invited from the right side of a pad and they can join a private site with restricted access to only the pad they are invited to.

Since Hackpad is a web-based application, there is no need to download software or host it on a server. Hackpad enables teams to create cross linked wikis fast and efficient. You can create new pages, set links to current pages, embed tasks and media into pages, and share everything with others working on-premises or remotely. The editing in Hackpad happens in real-time so it is important to note the time zone differences of your remote users.

You can register with Hackpad in three ways. If you have an existing Facebook or Google account you would like to associate with a Hackpad you can do so or you can create a completely new account. New accounts are easy to setup and require minimal information.

Like the other business collaboration tools we have explored you can sign up for a free limited account. The limited account for Hackpad allows you to add up to five users on the account and after that you must pay $4 per user. Hackpad pricing works per private site so if you have more than five users per private site you must pay per each additional user. You can sign up for a free 30 day trial which doesn’t require a credit card and you are not held to any contract.

Delve

Delve for Office 365 is a collaboration tool used to help keep teams in touch. Delve is connected to your Office 365 account and offers feeds delivered to you based on your interests through the power of Office Graph. You can view information based on what is new and trendy and what you are working on.

Unlike Hackpad which is standalone, Delve is interconnected and delivers information you will most likely be interested in. If you are searching for a certain document but don’t know where it is, or what the title of it is - no problem. Delve will display documents you are looking for if they are on OneDrive for Business or in Sites in Office 365. You can view colleague profiles and edit your own with Delve. Your Delve profile acts as an online business card you can share with others within your organization.

Through the privacy in Delve others cannot see your documents and your permissions will never change. When viewing, editing, and sharing with others, Delve learns from these collaborations and customizes information for everyone on the team in your own personal home page. So, what you see will not be what your colleagues see as you will all have different interests.

In order to get the most out of Delve you should store documents where Delve can access them as well as sharing and grouping documents for team collaboration. Documents and files are safe in Delve since others don’t have access to your private files and activities such as your emails and Lync conversations you’ve had. Others can see when you have modified a document but only if they have access to that same document.

Another unique feature to Delve are content cards. Documents show up as content cards and the information on that card helps you understand why something may be of interest to you. You can easily open the document or just review the activity area on the top to see who modified it, how many colleagues have viewed it, and the total views it has had. The title on the card is useful for finding documents in Delve. Since Delve is bundled with Office 365 you are getting an extreme value for your monthly subscription. You can choose an Office 365 Business or Enterprise bundle which start at $5 per user per month and go up to $20 per user per month depending on various options available in Office 365. Overall, Delve offers many more features and functions than Hackpad. While Hackpad is a great and useful tool, it just does not offer the integration as Delve does.