Collaboration Category Archives
May 13, 2008
Marketing Webinar: Casting a Wider Web
On Wednesday May 14, WebEx and MarketingSherpa are teaming up to present Casting a Wider Web. This 2008 Marketing eSummit includes a series of webinars from experts at Marketo, Wainhouse Research, the American Marketing Association and Loomis Group on using the latest online marketing technology. In addition to these best practice and advice webinars, marketers from Cisco and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange will also talk about their real-world experience.
Two of the sessions focus on presenting research. In the first, Stephan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa and John Miller from Marketo will discuss trends for 2008. In the second, Andrew Nilssen and Alan D. Greenberg, both senior analysts and partners at Wainhouse Research as well as Nancy Costopulos, CMO of the American Marketing Association, will present survey results about the changing nature of online events.
The 2008 Marketing eSummit is a virtual event – in addition to the participating in the webinars, attendees have the ability to interact in real-time to discuss what they’ve seen and talk to presenters between sessions. The full program for the event is available here and registration for the event is here.
Marc Blakeney, Sr. Marketing Manager, Consulting Services & Event Center, WebEx
Posted by Cisco PR at 06:16 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
March 04, 2008
On Demand platform
by Colin Smith, director of public relations
WebEx Connect Named CODiE Finalist for Best On-Demand Platform
We've received some exciting news from the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) - the WebEx Connect Developer Network was selected as a finalist in the 2008 SIIA CODiE Awards in the Best On-Demand Platform category.
Full story http://blogs.webex.com
Posted by Cisco PR at 03:22 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
February 29, 2008
Effective Virtual Meetings
by Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx
Esther Schindler at CIO.com wrote a nice article that gives pointers on how to run effective virtual meetings. As management consultant Steven M. Smith notes at the top of the article, many people in organizations don't know how to run effective in-person meetings. With so many organizations having geographically dispersed workforces, developing those skills and applying them to virtual meetings is critical to productivity. Pet peeves get deserved prominence throughout the article.
One of the first pet peeve examples, a meeting participant subjecting the entire team to hold music, ranks high up there in terms of being disruptive to productivity. Giving the meeting host the ability to mute the offending line really makes a difference. If one participant has dialed in from a phone with poor line quality or a cell phone, it can net the same result, the static or street noise can override other participants trying to weigh in.
Even for people that have good meeting skills, I recommend looking it over. The article is a quick read and positive reinforcement on the basics often lost to hectic workdays, e.g. including meeting agendas in invites, should pay dividends at least for the next month or two of meetings.
On the topic of editorial, I wanted to give my congratulations to Dan Farber and Larry Dignan at ZDNet. Dan Farber is taking over editorial operations for ZDNet's CNet's sister site, News.com. Larry Dignan is taking over for Dan as Editor in Chief of ZDNet. Having worked for Dan when he was Editor in Chief of PC Week (now eWEEK) I can say he is an excellent manager, editor, and writer. I also worked with Larry at PC Week and eWEEK, he too is a top notch manager, editor, and writer, best wishes to both.
Posted by Cisco PR at 10:45 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
February 12, 2008
Schedule More Effectively in 2008
One initiative organizations can use to start 2008 off right is to more be more efficient and effective when scheduling meetings. Anyone that regularly tries to schedule meetings with participants outside his or her organization knows, a good deal of time can be wasted in email or on the phone trying to find common free time. The more parties involved, the more difficult those negotiations become. Shared calendars can be a way to avoid this, especially for dispersed or multi-organizational teams.
Travel time, even over relatively short distances such as a typical suburban to metro commute, can really add to a person’s stress level. In a previous job, I used to get a lot of requests to meet in-person for briefings either in the city or for breakfast or lunch at a local restaurant. Given the stress of the daily workload, even though I loved meeting with people face-to-face, I did everything I could to minimize the impact of these on my day. After a while I realized even scheduling meetings around off-peak drive times or changing the time I went into the office, couldn't make up for lost time. If you run into resistance or scheduling impasses when planning in-person meetings, go the audio or web conferencing route, it will save time for either you or other team members. Meeting online also benefits the environment by reducing a team's carbon footprint.
Sharing calendars with every partner or customer doesn’t always make sense, so having a standard way to invite someone to a meeting via email can simplify the process and increase the likelihood that invite recipient adds a meeting to his or her calendar. iCal is the standard data format for sending and processing invites. Of course when a shared calendar integrates with a web conferencing application, that integration can save a couple steps for the meeting organizer and makes it easier to track meetings for internal billing purposes.
Post by Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx
Posted by Cisco PR at 01:18 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
January 10, 2008
Resolve to Help Your Co-workers Stay Organized in 2008
Post by Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx
Most businesses have wrapped up setting 2008 business goals and the methods and plans necessary to achieve those goals. For those that will spend the last couple weeks of the year wrapping up expenses and planning purchases, this time of year can also provide an opportunity to think about new work habits that will help reach those goals.
Last year Butler Group authored a study on worker time spent searching for information. Per this Network World article about the study, Butler Group found the cost of searching for information in lost productivity to be equivalent to 10% of a worker's salary. So reflecting on the day-to-day reality of 2007 can help identify and put in perspective where workers burn more cycles than they need to, including time spent searching in email for files coworkers sent.
Most people would find a good deal of that wasted time could be recovered if they had good tools at hand to help to stay on the same page. But even organizational tools that allow teams to share documents, such as WebOffice, aren't enough. Workers need the will as well as the way, and that's the second part of a resolution to be more organized in 2008. Managers and team members need to work together to stay organized.
With one of the teams I contribute to, when any of the team members author content for a project, we store it on our WebOffice. When I report my weekly accomplishments to that team's manager, I have to include links to the documents I've created. If I don't include the link, I can't claim credit.
This requirement reinforces the habit of putting knowledge in a central, easily accessible place accompanied with a good description of the document. It doesn't seem onerous knowing that coworkers can easily access the information and won't spend time on fruitless searches or recreating the content. The team actually polices itself, when contributors send an email that includes content worth sharing, other team members ask the sender to post it online.
The real value is in knowing that when everyone contributes in this effort, it ultimately saves you time. So the next time someone emails around a file for everyone to look at, have that person post it in a shared place and send the link instead. Then it is up to you to start thinking the first place to look is the shared resource, and not your inbox.
Posted by Cisco PR at 12:20 PM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
November 08, 2007
The Promise of Collaboration in the Evolving Workspace
Post by Nader Nanjiani, product and systems marketing manager in Cisco's Unified Communications business unit
and
Dave Butt, Manager of operations for Cisco's Unified Communications business unit
Simply put, to collaborate is to tap into the expertise of others when performing work. An individual’s expertise on a topic may be limited, but being able to pull in the skills of others, who may be remote, preferably in real time, could improve both the efficiency and the effectiveness of our work.
Consider for a moment how we work. If we look at the functions we perform within our workspace on a daily basis, we may classify them into four distinct buckets: We devise, we transact, we produce and we interact - in no particular order.
Devising relates to all the “figuring things out” stuff that we do at work such as planning, assessing, searching, or strategizing. Transactions, on the other hand, relate to tasks around negotiation, buying, payment processing, ordering, pricing, selling or acquiring. Interaction refers to us talking, conferring or meeting other colleagues for advice, approval, input or guidance. And production refers to creation of content whether that might be documents, deliverables, widgets or services. Technology tools have always had a role, but so far have not permeated through those work buckets.
How Might Collaboration Really Play Out at Work?
Imagine while processing payroll (a desire to transact), you come up with a question (a desire to interact). To pull away from that transaction session in order to set up a separate communication session in the workspace seems inefficient. But that’s exactly what happens currently. What if the ability to interact in real-time was embedded right into the payroll processing tool? Similarly an individual creating artwork (a desire to produce) should be able to seek input (a desire to interact) on her in-progress masterpiece from a mentors or colleagues – no matter how remote they maybe – in real time without having to interrupt the creative process.
Unified Communications Leads to Collaboration
Unified communications embeds real time communications capabilities such as voice, mobility, video, instant messaging, web-based conferencing, presence, and federation within our day to day tasks – thereby making possible substantial increase in productivity. As unified communications permeate through all aspects of work and are pervasive across all types of workspace devices, we stand to unlock the full potential of collaboration. As seamless sharing of communications becomes more prevalent while devising, transacting, interacting or producing, without the risk of delays, more of us will choose to collaborate.
Preparing Today’s Workspaces for Collaboration
A workspace could best be described as any location where collaboration tools are readily available. Workspace today is more a concept of time rather than place. We can distinguish our daily life into working or non-working moments. Irrespective of whether those moments occur while waiting at the theater box-office or lounging at the swimming pool. What distinguishes work from non-work is not so much the location but the predisposition of the individual. If a worker completes a conference call while at their child’s soccer practice, the soccer field would constitute the workspace for that moment in time.
Moving from a desktop centric notion of workspace to a user centric notion of the workspace might be the first step towards building an environment for collaboration. So instead of seeking to load resources on the desktop, organizations will need to find ways to make those resources available to individual workers in multiple workspaces over multiple devices to allow those resources to follow them. As work resources follow individuals everywhere and as individuals find individuals, instead of devices, every time, unified communications will have delivered on the promise of collaboration.
Posted by Cisco PR at 02:39 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
November 02, 2007
Learning Globally Using Collaborative Technology
Post by Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx
Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media has an interesting podcast with Dr. John Stuppy president of TutorVista, a one-on-one virtual tutoring service. TutorVista turns the tutoring model on its ear, most students will subscribe for $100 per month and have unlimited access to tutors to help them with a range of subjects. These students would largely be either high school or college students looking for help in a given subject or subjects.
TutorVista tutors are full-time employees that are globally dispersed, have advanced degrees and use a virtual whiteboard application (it's WebEx) and VoIP to interact one-on-one with students. TutorVista has an advantage over traditional tutoring companies in that the company doesn't have to be concerned about scaling physical infrastructure, i.e. classrooms, with demand.
Posted by Cisco PR at 12:24 PM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
October 16, 2007
VIDEO: Charlie Giancarlo on Collaboration Technology
Cisco's CDO, Charlie Giancarlo discusses the different aspects of collaboration technology as well as its practical applications in the work place and eventually in the home.
In this video blog he answers the following questions:
1. What is your vision for collaboration in the next generation workplace?
2. What is Cisco doing technologically to enable collaboration?
3. When will TelePresence be in the home?
Posted by Christie Miranda at 01:26 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
October 15, 2007
VIDEO: John Chambers on Collaboration, Innovation and Teamwork
Our CEO, John Chambers, wrote about collaboration for the first entry on this new blog. Cisco Vice President Alan Cohen followed up with an interesting take on Unified Communications and where Malcolm Gladwell and Woody Allen fit into the picture.
Today, our CEO offers a video blog on his high-level thoughts on collaboration and why it is so important to the economy. He answers the following questions:
1. Why is collaboration so important in a global economy?
2. What is the most important component of a company's collaboration strategy?
3. How is collaboration changing global management? And why now?
4. What is Cisco's role in collaboration?
Posted by John Earnhardt at 09:59 AM Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)
October 10, 2007
USHERING IN A NEW ERA OF COLLABORATION
John Chambers, Cisco Chairman and CEO
We are on the cusp of a new era where the Internet is transforming businesses large and small, and creating an entirely new environment for today’s workforce to communicate, collaborate and achieve. We have an opportunity to usher in a new era of economic growth and productivity and Internet-driven collaboration technologies are at the core of this transformation. Changing the very nature of work, these technologies are driving the rapid evolution of the workspace, where the desktop is complemented, and in some cases replaced, by smart phones and devices driven by a network-based platform.
As the value of information technology moves from the edge of the network into the core we will see a corresponding transition from transactional communications like phone calls and email to continuous collaborative experiences, similar to today’s social networking. Not only do we now expect to be able to connect to everyone from everywhere through every device—we expect it to be seamless, secure and simple. The intelligent network is what is making this possible.
Collaboration is the future. It is about what we can do together. And collaboration within and between firms worldwide is accelerating. It is enabled by technology and a change in behavior. Global, cross-functional teams create a virtual boundary-free workspace, collaborating across time zones to capture new opportunities created with customers and suppliers around the world. Investments in unified communications help people work together more efficiently. In particular, collaborative, information search and communications technologies fuel productivity by giving employees ready access to relevant information. Companies are flatter and more decentralized.
At the heart of these changes is the simple premise of connections and information. Cisco’s heritage has always been about connecting people---over the past 10 years, Unified Communications and Collaboration technologies are a natural extension of this heritage. Through these innovations, Cisco has led the way in developing next transformative applications of technology. A key example is video, a critical piece of any unified communications strategy. Cisco TelePresence unifies video with audio and information to create unique, in-person experiences between people, places, and events—all across the intelligent network. TelePresence is already transforming the way remote meetings take place. Consider this: one year ago I made 2 trips around the world to visit customers and it took me two weeks. Just recently, I visited the same number of customers, in the same number of international locations, in less than 8 hours, without leaving my office. The implications of this on the environment, a company’s competitive advantage and our quality of life, is tremendous.
Once upon a time, e-commerce and e-operations drove the Internet debate, but now it’s clear we have entered the second phase of the Internet. Although collaborative technologies and ‘Web 2.0’ have been around for many years, employing them through entire organizations will be made possible only by the intelligent network. At Cisco, we will drive this evolution with a vengeance. And we are going to help our customers do the same.
Posted by John Chambers at 11:13 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)
