Cisco Quad Update - One Year Later

Cisco Quad is an important and interesting component of Cisco’s Collaboration portfolio. I say interesting because when we first saw Quad a year ago there seemed to be a lot of potential, but Quad was a work in progress. The product had the potential to tie a lot of work and communication capabilities together in one cockpit or dashboard for a regular business user. Imagine Outlook combined with Twitter, Facebook, and select business applications you might use, all on one desktop. Quad is also similar to what contact center agents have experienced for years, with multiple functions on one screen, or the ability to get to them through one screen. Not surprisingly, Quad also has potential for use in the contact center to makeover what an agent in a contact center would use as the agent desktop, by providing a lot more functionality than what is currently available (particularly in the social media realm).
Yesterday, Cisco provided analysts with an update on Quad - one year later, by Murali Sitaram, who runs the Collaboration Software Group, where Quad now sits. We also had the opportunity to hear what Cisco has learned after trialing Quad on 64,000 Cisco users over the past year. Talk about a proof point of “eating your own dog food.” Murali showed us a live demo of Quad running on his desktop, rather than showing us a canned demo.
Collaboration is one of the key offerings at buy Cisco. In case you aren’t familiar with the portfolio, collaboration includes enterprise social software (such as social media and monitoring, e.g.; SocialMiner), conferencing, messaging, TelePresence, mobile applications, customer care, and IP communications. Even though these are separate product areas, Cisco has developed them with a continual eye on process, culture, and the interrelationship between these areas. Collaboration is truly people oriented, and as Murali explained, Quad is an enterprise collaboration platform that integrates the places people “live” at work; the social aspect, content, communication, and business process.
As he pointed out, as workers we are always dealing with different types of content, whether it is a spreadsheet, web page, word file, PDF file, presentation, etc. We also communicate through voice, video, and file sharing, etc. Different types of workers “live” with different applications. HR professionals live with applications such as Oracle or PeopleSoft; sales people spend part of their day with Salesforce.com, while customer service agents deal with an agent desktop, for example.
Cisco integrates with Microsoft OCS for instant messaging, SharePoint, Active Directory, and Exchange for calendaring. Quad also integrates with Documentum and other content repositories. Cisco is also looking to integrate with Lotus Notes for calendaring and Lotus Sametime for instant messaging, refurbished Cisco wants to continue to improve upon building a platform that integrates the Cisco components together, but over time with other third-party products, to provide an integrated experience. Quad is rooted in the social element, putting the user at the center of the conversation and bringing information to them.
Murali’s demo highlighted the four main areas of Quad. The first was Myview, which the user configures to highlight how they want to work during the day. Myview is rooted in the user’s activity feed, much like you would have on Facebook and Twitter, with a stream of content of interest to the user. The user can follow people or be followed, comment on posts, add photos, etc. Myview also can have calendar items, directory with presence capabilities, voicemail, etc.  It gives the user a sense of what is going on within their groups or teams.

Cisco WebEx

Cisco Systems has extended the power of its desktop- and video-sharing meeting service -- WebEx -- to iPhones and the iPad 2, with phenomenal results.
The app, which can be downloaded free from the Apple iTunes App Store, allows for access to and entry to WebEx meetings with full desktop sharing and audio sharing capabilities. Given iPhone 4’s ability to allow for multitasking, it's possible to now use an iPhone to call in to a meeting and share in the full assortment of materials involved.
You don't even need to set up a WebEx account for the iPhone, if you’ll only be accessing others' meetings and content that way.
Cisco price WebEx for iPhone is a winner.