Telecom Lead India: Cisco has introduced WebEx Social
that helps participation by enabling employees working on mobile devices,
email, and personal productivity applications to engage in social
collaboration with their colleagues.
The new WebEx Social software developer kit
(SDK) allows developers to extend core WebEx Social capabilities,
such as Activity Streams, Watch List, and Open Search, to critical business
applications.
Cisco WebEx Social provides a platform for people to
express themselves and strengthen their sense of connection to the company. At
the same time, it helps management seek out the wisdom of the crowds. For
example we have integrated microblogging into our daily jobs. Having
salespeople microblog about the week’s activities in advance of weekly sales
meetings reduced meeting time from 90 minutes to 15-20 minutes, an 80 percent
savings. Multiply that time saving by 25 people on the call, and we’ve freed up
30 hours weekly for more interaction,” said Ajay Deshpande, chief architect,
Persistent Systems.
WebEx Social has the following capabilities:
Microsoft Office Integration: Cisco is announcing integration
with WebEx Social and Microsoft Office that will empower workers using Word,
PowerPoint or Excel to jointly edit and post updated documents, presentations
and spreadsheets back to WebEx Social.
Email: Email no longer has to be a siloed application.
With enhanced e-mail integration, workers can stay in e-mail clients such as
Microsoft Outlook while also creating and posting updates to WebEx Social.
Mobility: Cisco is introducing enhancements to the WebEx
Social iPhone and iPad client that will give workers the ability to transition
from social networking to real-time IM, Web conferencing, and voice calls
directly from their mobile application.
Video: With new browser-based video calling, people can
seamlessly escalate to a high-definition (HD) video conferencing session,
without going to a separate application. These sessions are compatible with a
wide variety of video endpoints, including Cisco TelePresence®, IP video
phones, mobile and soft clients.
Flexible deployment models: With this release, customers
will have a choice of deployment models. WebEx Social is available as an
on-premise (WebEx Social Server) offering, partner-hosted (through Logicalis,
ACS and Alphawest) and a Cisco-hosted cloud-based solution.
More than ever, companies are rethinking the way they
have traditionally done business to take a more social approach. With today’s
announcements, Cisco is marrying the best of consumer social network features
with a complete set of integrated collaboration cloud services for a seamless and
integrated user experience. This new experience gives customers the option to
securely participate in social business from the device and application of
their choice,” said Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager, Cloud
Collaboration Technology Group, Cisco.