At a global company like Cisco a lot of our meetings are held as conference calls with people all over the world. These meetings can last an hour or more, so a company phone is useful especially after hours or when you’re traveling. For me, that’s when a softphone on my laptop is the best solution. It uses the power of the corporate network to make low-cost business calls (and they’re free to me). Many people at Cisco use Cisco IP Communicator, which is a great softphone. My preference is Cisco Unified Personal Communicator because it combines the softphone with presence information, instant messaging, and very recently a new feature called “click-to-conference” WebEx.
Finally, from Phones to Click-to-Connect Conferencing with Cisco Unified Personal Communicator
Showcasing Cisco’s Richardson Data Center at Cisco Live 2010
At Cisco Live 2010 in Barcelona last month, Cisco IT’s Rich Gore spoke with Donald De Witte of the Cisco Data Center Networks blog about our production data center in Richardson, Texas. As Rich noted, the technologies and IT architecture inside the Richardson data center (normally closed to the public) are shared in the Cisco IT Data Center Experience, an interactive virtual tour. If you haven’t seen the virtual data center tour, be sure to check it out.
Top Tips for Managing a Cisco Unified Personal Communicator Upgrade
Earlier this year, Cisco IT offered internal users a new version of the Cisco Unified Personal Communicator application that includes the very useful “click-to-conference” feature.
Because this application is very popular among users for managing their communications, we knew the upgrade should be rolled out in a controlled way to minimize disruptions.
Here are our top three tips for Cisco customers who are planning a similar upgrade:
Borderless Networks: Supporting the Business at Our Branch Offices
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Gone are the days when business operations were primarily concentrated at headquarters. Today, branch offices are the lifeblood of any global business and Cisco is no different. In this short video, Jawahar Sivasankaran from the IT Customer Strategy & Success group explores some of the business trends driving branch office business architectures at Cisco and some of the technology architectures that Cisco IT is using to meet these requirements.
Encouraging User Adoption of New Tools
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Our customers might expect that whenever Cisco releases a new product for individual users, it gets deployed immediately and then is pushed out to all company employees. Well, that isn’t always the case. First, Cisco IT doesn’t have the budget to pay the internal price for all the Cisco products that we’d really like to deploy. And second, Cisco employees can pick and choose which tools they want to use, and they don’t always use every tool we provide.
More on Cisco Internal WAAS Implementation
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In this short follow-on to my last blog post, I wanted to provide a little more detail on Cisco’s strategy, design and results for deploying WAN optimization as part of our Data Center/Virtualization and next generation remote office IT strategy.
Configuration Management: What’s Your Approach?
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Device configuration management can be a complicated beast. Have you tamed it? Do your IT policies enforce archive retention periods, audit trails, security compliance, or secure transfer methods? Do your change management policies mandate the ability to quickly perform configuration rollback?
Whether you’ve got configuration management licked or whether you’re lucky to remember to execute “copy run start,” we would like to gain a better understanding of the approach you’ve taken to device configuration management.
Cisco Internal WAAS Implementation
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WAN Optimization is an important part of Cisco IT’s infrastructure strategy.
Cisco IT has been implementing Cisco Wide Area Application Services, creating strong alignment between its Data Center and Borderless Networking architectures, while delivering a superior end user experience with Collaboration and Business applications.
In this blog, we provide a quick update on Cisco IT’s deployment of WAAS, and the progress and benefits of the solution. A case study update will be posted as follow on, and provide more details/results on our internal deployment.
More from the UC Sleuth: Resolving Intermittent Problems with Unity Voicemail
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My last blog described how Cisco IT resolved an intermittent availability problem resulting from a hung Unity voicemail port. Here’s another example of an intermittent problem, this one related to call quality.
For more than a year our global technical response center (GTRC) received occasional calls from Cisco users with voicemail issues. These users reported that the system didn’t recognize their key entries, or just mysteriously disconnected them.
Detecting Intermittent UC Outages: Why It’s Hard, and How We Do It
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Detecting intermittent outages is one of the tougher challenges in large unified communications environments. For one thing, it can be hard to recreate the problem. For another, users tend not to complain if they get through on the next try. And if users don’t complain, how can IT know there’s a problem?
A Cisco IT View of Borderless Networks
In an increasingly connected world, most of us now expect to be able to access our workspaces at any time, regardless of our geographic locations or user devices. At any given day, I could be working from my house, in the office, at the Starbucks down the street, or even in another city. Now, once I’m at these locations, what kind of devices can I use to work? Cisco understands that the way people work in the enterprise is changing because so many employees want to use their personal tools at work but how do we enable them to connect from anywhere with any device? That’s where Borderless Networks comes in.
Cisco Celebrates 25 Years of Technology Innovation
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Today, as we celebrate 25 years as a company , we think about how Cisco has watched the industry evolve. In this video from FoxBusiness.com, Rebecca Jacoby, senior vice president and chief information officer of Cisco, discusses lessons learned during the Dot Com Bubble Burst and how the Internet has changed over the years.
Cisco Unified Computing
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Network Virtualization and Unified I/O
Nexus Switches In the Cisco Data Center: Keeping IT Simple
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The benefits of the “less is more” philosophy seem to be more and more evident lately. A quick look at two of my favorite tech tools, Twitter and the iPhone, demonstrates how keeping things simple and easy to use are essential design principles in today’s markets. If you transpose that philosophy into the data center, it’s easy to understand why the Nexus family of switches is a necessary step forward for our networks. Cisco’s Nexus 7000 (core) and 5000 (edge/top of rack) switches evolves the Cisco IT data center with an emphasis on simplified architecture, virtualization and greater energy efficiency, all of which makes the data center more efficient.
