Cisco WebEx Social Brings Social Collaboration To Mobile Devices

Cisco has unveiled a variety of innovations that will make it possible for people to participate in social collaboration, regardless of where they are working, by bringing social capabilities to the devices and applications that workers use most often. The innovations pertain to what is now called Cisco WebEx Social (formerly known as Cisco Quad) and build upon existing offerings that help employees share knowledge, find experts and information, and form effective virtual work teams.

With this release of WebEx Social, Cisco is introducing 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.

Cisco is extending WebEx cloud services to not only encompass what was formerly known as Quad, but also Cisco Callway, Cisco’s hosted TelePresence solutions. Cisco is aligning its Quad and Callway brands with WebEx where they join a market leading portfolio of web conferencing and instant messaging solutions. By bringing a comprehensive solution to the cloud, Cisco provides users and IT with easy access to their social collaboration tools of choice from any device. The expanded WebEx family of cloud collaboration services will utilise the global data center footprint and operational excellence of the WebEx cloud to deliver highly available, real-time cloud services that meets the needs of the most demanding organisations. The WebEx cloud is the world’s second-largest public cloud for business collaboration applications.

Murali Sitaram, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Collaboration Technology Group, Cisco, said: “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.”